I have always noticed that when people ask the question ‘How do I figure out how much hard drive space I have left’ as it relates to the Linux / *nix shell, people always respond telling people to use the following command:
df
Output:
$ df Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/sdb5 56870784 22222576 31759324 42% / ... /dev/sda1 252960 122460 130496 49% /media/sda1 /dev/sda3 1441394492 1372242748 69151740 96% /media/sda3
In the above example, everything is hard to read since it’s in units of one thousand bytes. On some systems this defaults to multiples of 512 bytes unless you specific the -k option. I’m surprised that they don’t mention that if you add one simple switch (-h for human readable), you can make the output much easier to read on most systems:
df -h
Output:
$ df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sdb5 55G 22G 31G 42% / ... /dev/sda1 248M 120M 128M 49% /media/sda1 /dev/sda3 1.4T 1.3T 66G 96% /media/sda3
In the above example, you can see that I’ve used 1.3 terabytes of my main system drive, leaving me with 66 gigabytes free.
Side Note: You can also find out what file system type you are using by running the following command:
df- T
And it will produce the following results:
Filesystem Type 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/hdb1 ext3 19228276 14737848 3513680 81% / tmpfs tmpfs 383960 4 383956 1% /dev/shm
(The second column is the type)
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