Linux Command Cheatsheet: Disk usage and filesize cheatsheet Table of contents
- Introduction
- The commands:
- df - report file system disk space usage (show total hard drive disk usage)
- du - show file space usage (file sizes, total directory sizes, etc)
- Introduction to du
- Basic usage of du
- Changing it into a human readable format
- du for a specific directory
- Show all files (not just directories)
- Limit du to a certain number of subdirectories
- Give a summary (total size of directory) - this is the most used option
- Give a summary of each directory within a directory - second most used option
- Show the biggest files (using the sort command with du)
- Show the biggest directories and sort by largest
- Systems that these commands will work on
Introduction
There are two main commands when it comes to checking disk space and filesize (/directory size): df and du.
Here is a quick cheatsheet with the various useful commands to check for disk space, disk usage, etc on linux (/Mac OS) machines:
The commands:
df - report file system disk space usage (show total hard drive disk usage)
Introduction to df
The df command is for checking the total size (/space remaining) for your file systems/drives.
Show overview of all drives (/volumes) on the machine - df
When df is used without any options, it'll give a nice overview of the volumes on the machine.
df
Sample output:
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/vda1 41266360 5666600 33486296 15% / devtmpfs 930740 0 930740 0% /dev tmpfs 941376 0 941376 0% /dev/shm tmpfs 941376 100244 841132 11% /run tmpfs 941376 0 941376 0% /sys/fs/cgroup tmpfs 188276 0 188276 0% /run/user/0
Changing df into a more human readable format
But the above isn't so easy to read, so add a -h option to show it in human readable output:
df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/vda1 40G 5.5G 32G 15% / devtmpfs 909M 0 909M 0% /dev tmpfs 920M 0 920M 0% /dev/shm tmpfs 920M 98M 822M 11% /run tmpfs 920M 0 920M 0% /sys/fs/cgroup tmpfs 184M 0 184M 0% /run/user/0
Only show a certain filesystem
If you want to see info about only a certain filesystem, then you can do it like this:
df -h /dev/vda1
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/vda1 40G 5.5G 32G 15% /
Show the output in megabytes
To show the output with the sizes in megabytes, use the -m option. For example:
df -m /dev/vda1
Filesystem 1M-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/vda1 40300 5534 32702 15% /
To see the type of of filesystem, use -T. For example:
df -m -T /dev/vda1
Filesystem Type 1M-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/vda1 ext4 40300 5534 32702 15% /
du - show file space usage (file sizes, total directory sizes, etc)
Introduction to du
I personally find myself using du quite often, mostly to see the total size of directories.
Basic usage of du
If you run du with no options it'll show each file/directory within the current working directory, along with its size (in bytes):
du
8 Documents/GitHub/BlogEtc/migrations 56 Documents/GitHub/BlogEtc/tests 16 Documents/GitHub/BlogEtc/.git/objects/59 8 Documents/GitHub/BlogEtc/.git/objects/92 16 Documents/GitHub/BlogEtc/.git/objects/0c 16 Documents/GitHub/BlogEtc/.git/objects/3e 8 Documents/GitHub/BlogEtc/.git/objects/50 16 Documents/GitHub/BlogEtc/.git/objects/57 32 Documents/GitHub/BlogEtc/.git/objects/3b 8 Documents/GitHub/BlogEtc/.git/objects/6f 8 Documents/GitHub/BlogEtc/.git/objects/03 ...
Changing it into a human readable format
The above is good for sorting, but if you want to read it with your own eyes you will probably want to convert the bytes into a human readable format. Use the -h option to get the human readable version:
du -h
4.0K Documents/GitHub/BlogEtc/migrations 28K Documents/GitHub/BlogEtc/tests 8.0K Documents/GitHub/BlogEtc/.git/objects/59 4.0K Documents/GitHub/BlogEtc/.git/objects/92 4.0K Documents/GitHub/BlogEtc/.git/objects/50 8.0K Documents/GitHub/BlogEtc/.git/objects/57 16K Documents/GitHub/BlogEtc/.git/objects/3b 4.0K Documents/GitHub/BlogEtc/.git/objects/9b 12K Documents/GitHub/BlogEtc/.git/objects/04 4.0K Documents/GitHub/BlogEtc/.git/objects/56 ...
du for a specific directory
Normally you will want to enter a directory - just append it to the command like du -h /home/your-dir/.
du /your-directory/
Show all files (not just directories)
Use the following option (-a) to show all files, not just directories
du -a /your-directory/
Limit du to a certain number of subdirectories
You can do this with the max depth option. For example to show a max of 1 sub level (subdirectory):
du -d 1 /your-dir/
Obviously you should change the 1 to whatever you need!
Give a summary (total size of directory) - this is the most used option
This will give a total size of a directory - and it is a commonly used option for du.
du -s /var
538036 /var
Give a summary of each directory within a directory - second most used option
But sometimes you don't want a summary of just the one directory - you want to know how large each directory is within a directory. For example, to show how much space each website is using, if they are all in /home.
To do this, just add a * to the end, for example:
du -s /var/*
4 /var/adm 82736 /var/cache 4 /var/crash 20 /var/db 8 /var/empty 4 /var/games 4 /var/gopher 12 /var/kerberos 315512 /var/lib ...
Show the biggest files (using the sort command with du)
You can pipe the output of du to sort to sort it.
This won't work with the -h (human readable du output).
du -a /var/ | sort -n -r
10625624 /var/ 6291456 /var//vm 3828208 /var//db 3299200 /var//db/dyld 2286312 /var//db/dyld/dyld_shared_cache_x86_64h 2097152 /var//vm/swapfile1 ...
Show the biggest directories and sort by largest
du -s /var/* | sort -n -r
6291456 /var/vm 4956224 /var/db 1021944 /var/folders 92928 /var/log 4488 /var/networkd
Systems that these commands will work on
All of these commands for showing disk usage and remaining space will work on almost all *nix based operating systems, including Cent OS, Ubuntu, CoreOS, Debian, Mac OS etc. If you are using bash in a terminal, you can probably count on having du and df...!
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