You need to use the df command. It shows the amount of disk space available on the currently mounted file system. df is used to show or find out following information:
- Used and available space.
- File system mount points.
- File system capacity.
- The number of inodes available.
- Find of whether there is sufficient space to upgrade or install new apps.
Syntax
The basic syntax is as follows:
df
df /path/to/dev
df [options]
df [options] /path/to/dev
Examples
Type the following command:
# df
# df -H
Sample outputs:
The following example will provide information only for the partition/device that contains the /home directory:
# df /home
# df -h /home
To see inode usage instead of block usage, type:
# df -i
# df -i /
# df -ih /
# df -i /dev/md0
Sample outputs:
Filesystem Inodes IUsed IFree IUse% Mounted on /dev/md0 7872512 35813 7836699 1% /
Pass the -T to find out file system type:
# df -T -h
Sample outputs:
Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/md0 ext4 119G 1.8G 111G 2% /
tmpfs tmpfs 1002M 0 1002M 0% /lib/init/rw
udev tmpfs 1000M 260K 1000M 1% /dev
tmpfs tmpfs 1002M 0 1002M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/md2 ext4 1.5T 658G 745G 47% /data
/dev/mapper/cryptvg-mybackup
ext3 591G 78G 484G 14% /securebackup
df command options
From the df command man page:
-a, --all include dummy file systems
-B, --block-size=SIZE use SIZE-byte blocks
--total produce a grand total
-h, --human-readable print sizes in human readable format (e.g., 1K 234M 2G)
-H, --si likewise, but use powers of 1000 not 1024
-i, --inodes list inode information instead of block usage
-k like --block-size=1K
-l, --local limit listing to local file systems
--no-sync do not invoke sync before getting usage info (default)
-P, --portability use the POSIX output format
--sync invoke sync before getting usage info
-t, --type=TYPE limit listing to file systems of type TYPE
-T, --print-type print file system type
-x, --exclude-type=TYPE limit listing to file systems not of type TYPE
11 comment
Again, thank you! :D
Great! Thank you.
Df is great for finding the space available on a partition, but it doesn’t paint the entire picture of how much space is available on a hard drive. You would need to check the LVM displays as well as fdisk in order to best answer the question laid out in this article’s title.
Thnaks for providing the answer to this question in complete detail….
you can alse use “findmnt” which might not be provided in ALL UNIX-like variants.
Findmnt or df command
I use df to see how much available space there is on a mounted partition, but is there a good way to see how much space is used vs available on a whole disk, including unpartitioned space?
i suppose i could just look at df output and then compare that to fdisk’s output…
but i’m lazy and i’d love to find a better way or just a single utility/command that would do that for me.
use “cfdisk” command
Thanks for the tip. Cfdisk works pretty good. It makes my life a lot easier when I want to manage partitions from the CLI. Its a lot more visual than fdisk or parted and it’s dead simple. Seems like the next best thing if you don’t have access to gparted.
But even though cfdisk is great, I still wish there was a command like df that would simply return the available free space on the drive, like df does with partitions.
tnxxx
thanks
it is useful