Linux Check Free Disk Space

To check free disk space in Linux file system, you can use df command which stands for “Disk Free”.

Use df Command to See Free Disk Space

In the terminal, type df. Below you can see a simple filesystem information:

$ df
Filesystem     1K-blocks     Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda        98760300 92042164   5698864  95% /
tmpfs            4071520      148   4071372   1% /dev/shm

In this case, the main disk is the /dev/sda. Depending on machine and operating system, the path may vary.

Use df -h For Human-Readable Format

$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda         95G   88G  5.5G  95% /
tmpfs           3.9G  148K  3.9G   1% /dev/shm

• 1K-blocks tells that there are approximately 99G of space total
• Used tells that 92G is in use
• Available tells that only 5.7G is free
• Use% is simply a percentage about the usage
• Mounted on tells where the filesystem is mounted

The other one tmpfs is a temporary file storage which can be found in some Linux systems. It appears as a mounted file system, but data is stored in memory. When you are only interested in free disk space, you don’t have to pay attention to this at all.