If any user is experiencing low disk space on filesystem root (Ubuntu), here is how Ubuntu users can check available disk space via command line and make some free space.
This can help you avoid running out of space and ensure that your system runs smoothly.
To check the total disk space on your Linux Ubuntu system, you can use the terminal. Simply open up the terminal and enter the following command:
1. The df Command
The “df” command is for “disk filesystem” and is a great tool to know about the disk space usage on Linux Systems.
The df command displays the amount of disk space available on the file system. If no file name is given, the space available on all currently mounted file systems is shown.
When executed in its simplest form (without any command potions), the df command displays the information about the file system disk space usage – device name, total blocks, total disk space, used disk space, free disk space and mount points.
df
As the disk space is shown in 1K blocks by default, you can use “-h” command parameter to show the file system disk space usage data in “human readable” format.
df -h
-h is human readable format. It appends a size letter to each size, such as ‘M’ for mebibytes. Powers of 1024 are used, not 1000; ‘M’ stands for 1,048,576 bytes.
Note that this option is equivalent to ‘–block-size=human-readable’.
2. The du Command
‘du’ reports the amount of disk space used by the set of specified files and for each subdirectory (of directory arguments). With no arguments, ‘du’ reports the disk space for the current directory. Normally the disk space is printed in units of 1024 bytes, but this can be overridden.
There are many options for the du command. Here are some of the common ones:
- -a – write counts for all files and not just directories
- –apparent-size – prints apparent sizes rather than disk usage
- -h – human-readable format
- -b – bytes
- -c -grand total
- -k – block size
- -m – size in megabytes
- Display all files: Use the command du -a to see all files and the directories.
- Show a particular folder: Enter the path to the directory along with the command du -a. For instance, I would use the command du -a /home/don/Downloads to view the contents of my Downloads directory.
- Display size in human readable format: To display the disk usage or disk space in human readable format; in Gb, run the command with -h parameter (see above).