Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook - Third Edition

Disk free information

The du command provides information about the usage, while df provides information about free disk space. Use -h with df to print the disk space in a human-readable format. Consider this example:

    $ df -h
    Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
    /dev/sda1             9.2G  2.2G  6.6G  25% /
    none                  497M  240K  497M   1% /dev
    none                  502M  168K  501M   1% /dev/shm
    none                  502M   88K  501M   1% /var/run
    none                  502M     0  502M   0% /var/lock
    none                  502M     0  502M   0% /lib/init/rw
    none                  9.2G  2.2G  6.6G  25%   
    /var/lib/ureadahead/debugfs

The df command can be invoked with a folder name. In that case, it will report free space for the disk partition that contains that directory. This is useful if you don't know which partition contains a directory:

    $ df -h /home/user ...