added util file docs; reorged getting started

[RobJY]

Added documentation for some utilities we offer on Torch.

While working on that I had the idea about reorganizing the 'getting started' section, so I added that too. I thought it would be nice to give a little more information about the Slurm accounts since we still see questions about them.

I know the utilities documentation should be fleshed out a bit more, but I thought I'd make the PR to start the discussion.

Any suggestions?

[github-actions]

PR Preview Action v1.8.1
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2026-04-15 13:53 UTC

[RobJY]

Ok, I think I've gotten that fleshed out, so it's ready to go, unless anyone would like any changes.

[RobJY]

Looks great! Thanks for the fix and edits @s-sajid-ali !

[s-sajid-ali]

Last suggestion is to simplify:

find $HOME -xdev | cut -d "/" -f 1-4 | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -n 5

to:

du -sh --inodes ./* | sort -nr | head -n 5

unless we think this confuses our users as the former uses more steps

and maybe also add the following for space utilization:

du -sh ./* | sort -hr | head -n 5

[RobJY]

du -sh --inodes ./* | sort -nr | head -n 5
Much faster, but seems to miss the dot directories. .cache is the largest for my home directory and it was left out.

( shopt -s dotglob nullglob; du -s --inodes -- * 2>&1 | sort -nr | head -n 5 )
seems to catch them all and is shorter, but maybe too much for users to run?

Great idea to also give a command for space, but I'm getting the same issue with dot dirs/files. This seems to work:
( shopt -s dotglob nullglob; du -sh -- * 2>/dev/null | sort -hr | head -n 5 )

Do you know of a cleaner solution? I'll add these if not.

[s-sajid-ali]

Much faster, but seems to miss the dot directories. .cache is the largest for my home directory and it was left out.

Does this catch it?

du -sh --inodes . | sort -nr | head -n 5

[RobJY]

Hmm, that just returns dot:

[rjy1@torch-login-b-1 ~]$ du -sh --inodes . | sort -nr | head -n 5
2.8K	.

[s-sajid-ali]

This works:

~> du --inodes --max-depth=1 . | sort -nr | head -n 5
9010	.
6714	./.pixi
1729	./.cache
490	./.claude
25	./.local

~> du -h --max-depth=1 . | sort -hr | head -n 5
378M	.
370M	./.pixi
5.0M	./.claude
2.8M	./.cache
74K	./.local

[RobJY]

Yes, it just needs to be sorted and have '.' filtered out:

[rjy1@torch-login-b-1 ~]$ du --inodes -h --max-depth=1
1	./.apptainer
2.7K	./.cache
2	./.conda
6	./.config
7	./.emacs.d
3	./.ipynb_checkpoints
1	./.ipython
3	./.jupyter
7	./.local
8	./.ssh
4	./doc_testing
9	./myquota_container
11	./ondemand
1	./ubi_sandbox
2.8K	.

this isn't bad:

[rjy1@torch-login-b-1 ~]$ du --inodes -h -s -- * .[!.]* ..?* 2>/dev/null | sort -hr | head -n 5
2.7K	.cache
11	ondemand
9	myquota_container
8	.ssh
7	.local

what do you think?

[s-sajid-ali]

Looks good to me!

[RobJY]

Thanks for working through that @s-sajid-ali ! It looks much better now.

Please let me know if you see anything else.