How to Get Disk Space in Linux / Unix

Last updated on March 11th, 2021 at 09:33 am

Sometimes you may need to check disk usage or get disk space in Linux / Unix to find which file is using more space in Linux. Here’s how to get disk space in Linux. You can use it to check disk space usage in Ubuntu, CentOS, Redhat, Debian, Fedora and other systems.

 

How to Get Disk Space in Linux / Unix

You can check disk space in Linux / Unix using du (disk usage) or df (disk free) commands. Both support various options to find disk usage and show disk usage in different ways.

Here’s the syntax of du and df commands

du [options] [locations/devices]

df [options] [locations/devices]

We will look at different ways to use du and df commands

 

Bonus Read : How to Install Zip and Unzip in Linux

 

How to Check Disk Space from terminal

Here’s how to check disk usage from terminal.

$ du

The above command will list space occupied by all files & folders in your present working directory (pwd). Since there can be many files & directories in a file system, we pass the output of du command to head command and select only the first 10 results. You can change it as per your requirements

$ du | head -n 10

Here’s a sample output

ubuntu@ip-172-30-0-194:~$ du | head -n 10
4       ./.qws/share/data/Ofi Labs/PhantomJS
8       ./.qws/share/data/Ofi Labs
12      ./.qws/share/data
16      ./.qws/share
20      ./.qws
4       ./.gnupg/private-keys-v1.d
8       ./.gnupg
52      ./conf/.git/hooks
8       ./conf/.git/info
4       ./conf/.git/branches

 

If you don’t want Linux/Unix to display disk usage of subfolders and files in folders, then you can use max-depth option. The following command will give disk usage of only files and folders located at your current directory.  It will not recursively calculate disk usage of all subfolders and files in folders.

$ du --max-depth=1

Here’s sample output

ubuntu@ip-172-30-0-194:~$ du --max-depth=1
20      ./.qws
8       ./.gnupg
44704   ./conf
125548  ./fedingo
9592    ./.cache
8       ./.vim
8       ./.ssh
49176   ./.local
259896  .

The above command lists all files & folders in your present working directory along with their size in bytes.

You can get more details about du command using

$ man du

 

How to get disk usage for specific folder / directory

Here’s the linux command to get disk usage for specific directory / folder

$ du /path/to/dir

Here’s an example of du command for specific folder (e.g /etc/)

$ du /etc/

 

How to get disk usage in GB and MB

You can use the following command to get disk usage in human readable format (Mb and Gb)

$ du -h

ubuntu@ip-172-30-0-194:~$ du -h --max-depth=1
20K     ./.qws
8.0K    ./.gnupg
44M     ./conf
123M    ./fedingo
9.4M    ./.cache
8.0K    ./.vim
8.0K    ./.ssh
49M     ./.local
255M    .

 

How to get disk usage by folder / directory

You can get disk space in linux for all files and directories using -a option. We will use its output to get disk usage by directory / folder.

Here’s the command to get top 5 biggest subfolders on your disk

$ sudo du -a | sort -n -r | head -n 5

 

Here’s the command to get top 5 biggest subfolders in a specific folder/directory

$ sudo du -a /path/to/dir | sort -n -r | head -n 5

 

We will use the above command to get top 5 biggest folders in /etc folder

$ sudo du -a /etc/ | sort -n -r | head -n 5
7432    /etc/
1076    /etc/apparmor.d
684     /etc/apache2
640     /etc/ssl
616     /etc/ssl/certs

In the above command we get the disk usage of all files and folders at /etc using du -a command. We sort this output using sort command in descending order of bytes. Finally, we select only top 5 records.

 

Similarly, you can use df command to get disk space in linux for a user across various disks where the user has read access.

Here’s the command to check disk space using df command, and get disk usage in human readable format (Mb and Gb)

$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev            476M     0  476M   0% /dev
tmpfs            98M  784K   98M   1% /run
/dev/xvda1      7.7G  4.7G  3.1G  61% /
tmpfs           490M     0  490M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
tmpfs           490M     0  490M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/loop0       18M   18M     0 100% /snap/amazon-ssm-agent/1566
/dev/loop3       29M   29M     0 100% /snap/amazon-ssm-agent/2012
/dev/loop4       97M   97M     0 100% /snap/core/9665
/dev/loop2       97M   97M     0 100% /snap/core/9804
tmpfs            98M     0   98M   0% /run/user/1000

The above command lists all file systems the user has access to, one per row. The first row of output contains column names such as filesystem, total disk space, disk space used, disk space available, percentage disk space used, and location of mount. You can use it to get disk size of various file systems you have access to.

 

Hopefully, the above commands will help you get disk space in linux for any folder / directory in human readable format.

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