What's a single command I can run that shows me the total amount of space free on a hard drive? I don't want to do any math, I just want a command that shows me the total free space on my hard drive.
4 Answers
You can use the df
command:
$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 3.9G 0 3.9G 0% /dev
tmpfs 799M 8.7M 790M 2% /run
/dev/xvda1 50G 6.3G 41G 14% /
tmpfs 3.9G 0 3.9G 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
tmpfs 3.9G 0 3.9G 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
cgmfs 100K 0 100K 0% /run/cgmanager/fs
tmpfs 799M 0 799M 0% /run/user/1000
Here, /dev/xvda1
is my main disk, and it has 41 GB free.
You can also limit the output to only a specific disk or directory:
$ df -h /
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/xvda1 50G 6.3G 41G 14% /

- 2,754
You can use df with the total flag
--total
produce a grand total
df --total
or
df --total -h
for human readable output (i.e K,M,G)
This wil produce output such as
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 23G 13G 8.7G 60% /
udev 4.0G 124K 4.0G 1% /dev
tmpfs 4.0G 72K 4.0G 1% /dev/shm
total 31G 13G 17G 44%
To only show the total for physical harddisk space(including nfs)
df -x tmpfs --total -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 23G 13G 8.7G 60% /
total 23G 13G 8.7G 60%
Depending on which filetypes you want to exlude (as udev appears to be able to be either tmpfs
or devtmpfs
) you can use
df -T
Filesystem Type 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 ext3 23731644 13486576 9039564 60% /
udev tmpfs 4093900 124 4093776 1% /dev
tmpfs tmpfs 4093900 72 4093828 1% /dev/shm
^
This column
To check the filetypes and then just put the required ones into the -x
command
Also note that all of these are GNU extensions so you require GNU df.

- 1,552
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That "total" is misleading. You don't have 17G free in your hard drive, only 8.7. The udev and tmpfs filesystems don't count. – muru Feb 04 '16 at 08:23
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@muru doesn't on mine, udev is tmpfs filetype
udev tmpfs 4093900 124 4093776 1% /dev
– 123 Feb 04 '16 at 08:45 -
Odd. It happens to me on Ubuntu 14.04 (
3.13.0-74-generic
) and Arch Linux (4.4.1-2-ARCH
). – muru Feb 04 '16 at 08:46 -
df
(or df -h
for "human readable" sizes) shows you the filesystem devices, how big are they, how much is used, how much is available, and their mount points in the system.
Take a look here if you want to see some more console commands in your Linux Mint.

- 674
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Those other commands from that link helped me with a problem (of self control) I've been having. I loose track of time and stay up all night on my computer, the command will stop that forcefully after the time I allow myself. the command is (sudo) shutdown -h <time_in_minuets> – DeJeL Feb 02 '16 at 10:13
You can use pydf
. It's an improved version of df
.
http://linux.die.net/man/1/pydf
It produces an output like this:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb5 92G 16G 70G 17.9 [##...........] /
/dev/sdb6 347G 31G 298G 9.0 [#............] /home

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Cinnamon does not start with that installed. I want a command that can do this 'cause I'm low on data. So I can't install anything. – DeJeL Feb 02 '16 at 12:20
df
– 123 Feb 02 '16 at 09:33