Linux Tip: How to clear some room

I’ve been running out of disk space on my laptop. Multiple development environments, vmware images, my music collection, and especially my camera RAW originals take a heavy toll. Most data on a computer is already highly-compressed, but the whole idea behind RAW files is that they are not compressed — they represent the original image sensor data. So, here’s a one-liner I used for freeing up some disk space. (I have an Olympus camera, whose raw file format has the ORF extension.)

find ~/Documents/images/photos/raw -name "*.ORF" | xargs -n 1 bzip2

Just using standard bzip compression reduces each file by about 50%. And, since I had 10 gigs of raw files, that translates into 5 gigs of space I’ve freed up.