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I am trying to understand the disk usage in my RHEL system. When I run the Disk Usage Analyzer tool graphically, my screen shows the below output.

enter image description here

However, if I run the command df -h I get the below output. 

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda5              38G   23G   14G  64% /
/dev/sda7             146G   48G   91G  35% /home
/dev/sda3              99M   23M   72M  24% /boot
tmpfs                 2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /dev/shm

In the graphical output, I see the / is having 71.7 GB and usage is 100%. However, from the command line, I see that I still have 14G left and the use % is only 64. Why is there a discrepancy between the command line and the graphical output?

How can I interpret the output?

Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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Ramesh
  • 39,297

2 Answers2

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That's because the GUI tool (I think that's baobab) does not take into account the different partitions, it only looks at the directory tree. This means that it sees /home as a subdirectory of / but does not consider that it is a separate partition.

If you look at your df output:

/dev/sda5              38G   23G   14G  64% /<br>
/dev/sda7             146G   48G   91G  35% /home

you have 23G used in / and 48G used in /home. 48+23=71 so baobab is reporting 71G used in /.

terdon
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Another possible cause is running the Disk Usage Analyzer under a nonprivileged system user. If you do this, you'll only see the directories that that user has access to, and it might not be obvious at first that this is the case.

For example, if I run the Disk Usage Analyzer as my normal user on one system I use, I get this: Disk Usage Analyzer as nonprivileged user but if I sudo it, I get this: enter image description here

The second usage here captures a lot more usage of my disk.

MarkR
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