What is the command to find out how much disk space is being used/remaining?

8 Answers

You can use two commands: df and du.

df - report file system disk space usage

Usage works like such:

df -h

Which should output something like this:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/vzfs 20G 3.5G 16G 18% /

The -h flag provides human readable output (which makes reading of the output - easier).

du - estimate file space usage

A second tool is with du which is a slower approach but will give you a better break down of a per directory. Information on that can be found in How to determine where the biggest files/directories on my system are stored?

There are several good command line tools for reporting disk usage. Use the one that's most helpful to you:

df

$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 56G 4.4G 48G 9% /
none 1.5G 256K 1.5G 1% /dev
none 1.5G 472K 1.5G 1% /dev/shm
none 1.5G 400K 1.5G 1% /var/run
none 1.5G 0 1.5G 0% /var/lock
tmpfs 1.5G 596K 1.5G 1% /var/log
tmpfs 1.5G 8.0K 1.5G 1% /var/log/apt
/dev/sdb2 840G 579G 253G 70% /home

df is installed by default.

pydf

$ pydf
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 55G 4437M 48G 7.9 [##.........................] /
none 1506M 256k 1505M 0.0 [...........................] /dev
/dev/sdb2 839G 578G 252G 68.9 [###################........] /home

Column headers are colored.

discus

$ discus
Mount Total Used Avail Prcnt Graph
/ 55.02 GB 4.33 GB 50.69 GB 7.9% [*---------]
/sys 0 KB 0 KB 0 KB 0.0% [----------]
+onnections 0 KB 0 KB 0 KB 0.0% [----------]
+rnel/debug 0 KB 0 KB 0 KB 0.0% [----------]
+l/security 0 KB 0 KB 0 KB 0.0% [----------]
/dev 1.47 GB 256 KB 1.47 GB 0.0% [----------]
/dev/shm 1.48 GB 472 KB 1.48 GB 0.0% [----------]
/var/run 1.48 GB 400 KB 1.48 GB 0.0% [----------]
/var/lock 1.48 GB 0 KB 1.48 GB 0.0% [----------]
/var/log 1.48 GB 596 KB 1.48 GB 0.0% [----------]
+ar/log/apt 1.48 GB 8 KB 1.48 GB 0.0% [----------]
/home 839.00 GB 578.13 GB 260.87 GB 68.9% [*******---]
+infmt_misc 0 KB 0 KB 0 KB 0.0% [----------]
+e/ak/.gvfs 0 KB 0 KB 0 KB 0.0% [----------]

Column headers and progress bars are colored.

di

$ di
Filesystem Mount Mebis Used Avail %Used fs Type
/dev/sda1 / 56340.2 4436.7 49041.6 13% ext4
/dev/sdb2 /home 859138.9 592008.8 258401.8 70% ext4
tmpfs /var/log 1511.2 0.6 1510.6 0% tmpfs
tmpfs /var/log/apt 1511.2 0.0 1511.2 0% tmpfs

2

Try du -sh <dir>.

For example, du -sh /home/mark will show a summarised usage report in human-readable output for /home/mark.

You can use this command to find out how much space files in your home directory (replace ~/ with / for entire filesystem) and sort by largest files

du -sk ~/* | sort -n

GNOME System Monitor

If you prefer graphical gnome-system-monitor:

Disk Usage Analyzer

The Disk Usage Analyzer counterpart for CLI would be ncdu.

df -h is your best bet (run it in the Terminal).

ncdu

You can also use ncdu (available directly from the Ubuntu repos) which use the ncurses library for showing a graphical overview directly in the terminal.

For example:

ncdu -x /

will analyze disk usage on root partition without crossing filesystem boundaries.

Note that df -h will show you only remaining space on mounted partitions. Suppose there are NTFS and FAT32 partitions too before running it note that mount all the partitions. If Ubuntu is sole OS on your machine then I don't see any problem with df.

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