Hard Disk and Space Management on Linux: Reference & Examples
Last updated:Table of Contents
- Disk Usage by Partition
- Get current partition
- Size of current partition
- Size of each directory under path
- Size by directory, limit depth
- Number of files in directory
Here are some commands that can help you view the state of your hard disk:
You should probably run these commands as root (or using
sudo)
Disk Usage by Partition
$ sudo df -h
Example output
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/ubuntu1264-root 28G 17G 11G 62% /
udev 988M 4.0K 988M 1% /dev
tmpfs 199M 276K 199M 1% /run
none 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
none 995M 0 995M 0% /run/shm
/dev/sda1 228M 71M 145M 33% /boot
Get current partition
Use $ findmnt --target .
Current partition is /dev/sda2/
Size of current partition
Call df -h . to instruct df to run on the current directory:
Example: get size and space left in current partition
$ df -h .
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 117G 82G 29G 75% /
Size of each directory under path
This might take up some time, depending on how fast your disk is
Example Size of each directory under /home/johndoe/:
$ sudo du -h /home/johndoe/ | sort -h
Output:
27M /home/johndoe/Downloads/yii_13
35M /home/johndoe/3bsa.git/objects/pack
44M /home/johndoe/3bsa.git/objects
45M /home/johndoe/3bsa.git
74M /home/johndoe/Downloads/elasticsearch-1.2.1
204M /home/johndoe/Downloads
1.4G /home/johndoe/
Size by directory, limit depth
Set flag --max-depth=<MAX_DEPTH> to limit subdirectory depth.
$ sudo du -h --max-depth=2 / | sort -h
Example output (only some lines displayed)
3,0G /var/www
3,4G /usr/local
4,6G /usr/lib
6,5G /var
13G /usr
58G /media
58G /media/felipe
400G /home
400G /home/felipe
479G /
Number of files in directory
No Recursion
List the files in directory and pipe the output to wc -l
Example: count number of files in current directory (not including subdirectories)
$ find . -maxdepth 1 -type f | wc -l
12
Recursively
To include subdirectories recursively, just omit the -maxdepth modifier.
$ find . -type f | wc -l
8381