On the internet you will find plenty of tools for checking disk space utilization in Linux. However, unix has a strong built-in utility called ‘df‘. The ‘df‘ command stands for “disk filesystem“, it is used to get a full summary of available and used disk space usage of the file system on unix system.
Unix family of operating systems offer the following commands to check disk space usage as per your needs.
Check disk space on Unix operating system
Unix command to check disk space:
- df command – Shows the amount of disk space used and available on Unix file systems.
- du command – Display disk usage statistic for each directory on Unix server.
How to display Unix disk usage statistics
See disk usage for all files in the current directory. Run:
du -a
To get the disk usage of a directory tree and each of its subtrees for /home/dataparadise, enter:
du /home/dataparadise
However, it is possible to see outout 1024-byte blocks if you pass the -k switch, enter:
du -k /home/dataparadise
Want to see total disk usage of a directory tree? Try:
du -s /home/dataparadise
248088 /home/dataparadise
One can summarize disk usage for a specific directory as follows:
du -hs /home1.4G /home
Getting help about du command
Try running the following man command or see online man page here:
man du whatis du
How to display free disk space info on Unix
To view the amount of free space in the file system, try df command:
Display a grand total
Pass the -c option:
df -c
Some version of Unix operating systems can display output in human readable format. In other words, Use unit suffixes: Byte, Kibibyte, Mebibyte, Gibibyte, Tebibyte and Pebibyte:
df -H
See df command man page here or by typing the following command for more info:
man df