Check all disk space linux

10 different methods to check disk space in Linux

Table of Contents

In this article I will share different commands and methods to check disk space in Linux. Most of these commands and methods should be available on most Linux distros. You can also utilise these commands to create a script to monitor disk size usage and create alarms or send mails (this would need a mail server).

1. Check partition size using df command

df is one of the most used command to check space of available partitions on the Linux setup. You can use df wih -Th to print the partition type and the partition size in human readable format. This command will show you the total available, used and free space per partition.

You can also use other arguments such as -i to print the available, used and free inode count per partition:

You can check the man page of df command for other supported arguments to check disk space in different formats.

2. Check disk space using fdisk utility

fdisk is another very handy utility for system administrators. fdisk is a user interactive program mostly used for creation and manipulation of partition tables such as creating, deleting, modifying partitions. But we can also use this utility to list the available disks connected to the Linux system along with the respective disk size.

Here is a snippet of output from command » fdisk -l »

As you can see from the output, I have a disk /dev/sda with a size of 15GB. The output also shows more details about this disks wherein it contains two partitions /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2 .

The output of fdisk -l can be quiet long so if you just wish to check the disk space then you can use this command:

Here I have combined fdisk with awk to only print required sections. So I have two disks with 15GB and 8GB each, while I have two LVM partitions which are most likely part of these disks with a size of 14GB and 512MB.

3. Check disk space using parted utility

parted is another alternative to fdisk and is also used for manipulating disk partitions. It is useful for creating space for new operating systems, reorganising disk usage, and copying data to new hard disks.

Similar to fdisk , we can use parted -l to list all the available disks along with their respective size:

If you compare the output of parted with fdisk , here we only get the available disk and their size and the LVM details are missing which is a good thing as we only wanted to check the disk space.

We can also use awk with parted to further only print required output:

4. Check file size using du command

du is another wonderful utility to check the size of files recursively in Linux. It can also summarize disk usage of the set of files, recursively for directories. du is a very versatile tool and supports multiple arguments which you can use based on your requirement. Some of the most used arguments are:

Here are some example demonstrating different scenarios to check file system size using du command:

EG-1: Check size of all the files under a partition recursively

I have a separate partition for /boot :

So let’s check the size of all the files under /boot using du -h /boot/*

EG-2: Print total summary of size of files in a partition or directory

We can use du -c to print a total or summary of all the file size under provided directory or partition.

So the total file size under /etc/iscsi directory is 20K . You can also use this command under root i.e. du -sch /* to get a summary and total size of all the files under /

EG-3: Sort the output based on file size

By default the du command will print the size of the file based on the first available directory or sub-directory. So the output is not sorted and it can be a tedious task to go through the long list. We can combine du with sort command do sort the output based on the file size.

Here we have used du with sort -hr where -h is used to compare human readable numbers such as 2K, 1G, 4M etc while -r is used to reverse the order of search.

EG-4: Print file size larger than specified size

By default du will print the size of every file found under a partition or directory. We can add a threshold to print files higher than a certain size.

For example here we are printing the files with size higher than 1MB under /var/log

For more list of supported options check the man page of du command.

5. Check disk size using lsblk command

lsblk lists information about all available or the specified block devices. The lsblk command reads the sysfs filesystem and udev db to gather information. If the udev db is not available or lsblk is compiled without udev support than it tries to read LABELs, UUIDs and filesystem types from the block device.

We can use lsblk with -o LIST or —output LIST to get desired columns based on the value of LIST. Use lsblk —help to get a list of all supported columns.

We will use name, fstype, size, mountpoint LIST for our example. Although using only size and name was enough but to give more detailed output I am using additional list options.

6. Print disk size using blockdev

We can use blockdev command to print a report for the specified device. It is possible to give multiple devices. If none is given, all devices which appear in /proc/partitions are shown. Note that the partition StartSec is in 512-byte sectors.

You can also use following commands:

7. Check disk size and details using lshw command

lshw is a small tool to extract detailed information on the hardware configuration of the machine. It can report exact memory configuration, firmware version, mainboard configuration, CPU version and speed, cache configuration, bus speed, etc. on DMI-capable x86 or IA-64 systems and on some PowerPC machines.

By default lshw will give you a huge output, we can limit that by only printing the information for a specified class such as » disk «. To get the list of attached disks and their details such as size we will use lshw -c disk .

Here is an output snippet from my Linux node:

We can further improve the output using lshw with grep :

8. Checking disk size from the system logs

We can also use system logs such as boot logs using dmesg or journalctl -b and try to search for respective disk to get more information. The catch is that you should know the disk name unlike other methods which we discussed where we were able to check size of all the available disks without prior knowledge of disk name.

For example, here I am searching for all instance of sda disk in boot logs using dmesg :

Similarly we can search for any other disk, such as sdb :

You may also try grepping blocks in dmesg output which can list the available disk with their size:

9. Check disk size using lsscsi command

lsscsi uses information in sysfs (Linux kernel series 2.6 and later) to list SCSI devices (or hosts) currently attached to the system. Many non-SCSI storage devices (but not all) used the SCSI subsystem in Linux. In lsscsi version 0.30 support was added to list NVMe devices.

We can use lsscsi —size to list all the connected storage devices along with their size as shown below:

10. Print disk size using sfdisk

sfdisk is again an alternative to fdisk and parted utility. One of the major difference between fdisk and sfdisk is that sfdisk reads and writes partition tables, but is not interactive like fdisk or cfdisk (it reads input from a file or stdin). It’s generally used for partitioning drives from scripts or for partition table backup and recovery.

But it can also be used to check the disk size using sfdisk -l , sample output:

Summary

In this article we explored different commands and methods which can be used to check disk size (used/available/total) in Linux. You can easily utilize most of these commands and methods into a script to regularly monitor the available disk space and raise alarm when threshold is reached. There are some more commands such as udisks, hwinfo which can be used to collect similar information but they are distro dependent and may not be available with all the Linux distributions hence I have skipped them.

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12 Useful “df” Commands to Check Disk Space in Linux

On the internet, you will find plenty of tools for checking disk space utilization in Linux. However, Linux 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 the Linux system.

Using ‘ -h ‘ parameter with (df -h) will show the file system disk space statistics in “human-readable” format, means it gives the details in bytes, megabytes, and gigabyte.

Useful df Command Examples

This article explains a way to get the full information of Linux disk space usage with the help of the ‘df‘ command with their practical examples. So, you could better understand the usage of the df command in Linux.

1. Check File System Disk Space Usage

The “df” command displays the information of device name, total blocks, total disk space, used disk space, available disk space, and mount points on a file system.

2. Display Information of all File System Disk Space Usage

The same as above, but it also displays information of dummy file systems along with all the file system disk usage and their memory utilization.

3. Show Disk Space Usage in Human Readable Format

Have you noticed that the above commands display information in bytes, which is not readable at all because we are in a habit of reading the sizes in megabytes, gigabytes, etc. as it makes it very easy to understand and remember.

The df command provides an option to display sizes in Human Readable formats by using ‘-h’ (prints the results in human-readable format (e.g., 1K 2M 3G)).

4. Display Information of /home File System

To see the information of only device /home file systems in human-readable format use the following command.

5. Display Information of File System in Bytes

To display all file system information and usage in 1024-byte blocks, use the option ‘ -k ‘ (e.g. —block-size=1K ) as follows.

6. Display Information of File System in MB

To display information of all file system usage in MB (MegaByte) use the option ‘ -m ‘.

7. Display Information of File System in GB

To display information of all file system statistics in GB (Gigabyte) use the option as ‘df -h‘.

8. Display File System Inodes

Using ‘ -i ‘ switch will display the information of a number of used inodes and their percentage for the file system.

9. Display File System Type

If you notice all the above commands output, you will see there is no Linux file system type mentioned in the results. To check the file system type of your system use the option ‘ T ‘. It will display file system type along with other information.

10. Include Certain File System Type

If you want to display a certain file system type use the ‘ -t ‘ option. For example, the following command will only display the ext3 file system.

11. Exclude Certain File System Type

If you want to display a file system type that doesn’t belongs to the ext3 type use the option ‘ -x ‘. For example, the following command will only display other file systems types other than ext3.

12. Display Information of df Command.

Using ‘—help ‘ switch will display a list of available option that is used with df command.

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Linux / Unix – Checking Free Disk Space

Tutorial details
Difficulty level	Easy
Root privileges	No
Requirements	None
Est. reading time	1m

(a) df command : Report file system disk space usage.

(b) du command : Estimate file space usage.

df command examples to check free disk space

Type df -h or df -k to list free disk space:
$ df -h
OR
$ df -k
Sample outputs that show disk space utilization:

The df utility displays statistics about the amount of free disk space on the specified file system or on the file system of which file is a part. Values are displayed in 512-byte per block counts. The -H option is called as “Human-readable” output. It use unit suffixes: Byte, Kilobyte, Megabyte, Gigabyte, Terabyte and Petabyte in order to reduce the number of digits to four or fewer using base 10 for sizes i.e. you see 30G (30 Gigabyte).

How to check free disk space in Linux

To see the file system’s complete disk usage pass the -a option:
df -a
Find out disk usage and filesystem type by passing the -T option:
df -T
Want to get used and free inodes information on Linux? Try:
df -i

du command examples for checking free and used disk space

The du command shows how much space one ore more files or directories is using, enter:
$ du -sh
Sample outputs:

Fig.01: Unix df and du command outputs from my FreeBSD server

Say hello to ncdu command

ncdu (NCurses Disk Usage) is a curses-based version of the well-known ‘du’, and provides a fast way to see what directories are using your disk space. One can install with the following apt command/apt-get command:
sudo apt install ncdu
For RHEL/CentOS, first enable EPEL repo (see CentOS 8 turn on EPEL repo and RHEL 8 enable epel repo) and type the following yum command:
sudo yum install ncdu
Now just type:
ncdu
ncdu [dir] ncdu /etc/

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GUI program

Above programs are good if GUI is not installed or you are working with remote system over the ssh based session. Linux and UNIX-like oses comes with KDE and Gnome desktop system. You will find Free Disk Space Applet located under GUI menus. Here is a sample from Fedora Linux version 22 system:

Conclusion

You learned how to keep track of disk utilization, and disk space with various Linux and Unix commands.

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