Command line how much disk space

The -a all option asks df to include every filesystem, and using the --output option without a comma-separated list of columns causes df to include every column. Piping the output from df through the less command is a convenient way to review the large amount of output this can produce.

We can use the du command to show which folders are holding the most data. Issuing the du command with no options will display a list of all directories and sub-directories below the directory the du command was issued in.

If you do this from your home folder the listing will be very long. The output format is very simple. Each line shows the size and name of a directory. By default, the size is shown in 1K blocks.

To force du to use a different block size, use the -B block size option. To use 1M blocks, use this command:. Just like df , du has a human-readable option, -h , which uses a range of block sizes according to the size of each directory. The -s summarize option gives a total for each directory without displaying the sub-directories within each directory. The Picture folder holds the most data by far. We can ask du to sort the folders in size from largest to smallest. By refining the information returned by df and du it is easy to find out how much hard disk space is in use, and to discover what is taking up that space.

You can then make an informed decision about moving some data to other storage, adding another hard drive to your computer or deleting redundant data.

These commands have a lot of options. We described the most useful options here, but you can see a complete listing of the options for the df command and for the du command in the Linux man pages. Browse All iPhone Articles Browse All Mac Articles Do I need one? Browse All Android Articles Browse All Smart Home Articles Customize the Taskbar in Windows Browse All Microsoft Office Articles What Is svchost.

Browse All Privacy and Security Articles Browse All Linux Articles Browse All Buying Guides. Best Portable Monitors. Windows advanced users tend to operate in a background program called Windows Command Prompt, where you can apply a variety of command lines to troubleshoot very common computer issues, most of which require administrator's privilege to get started. Therefore, if you have some computer skills, and have a good command of basic command lines, you can use the following command to check the total hard drive size for a specific hard drive.

Search command prompt in Windows 10, and right-click on the result and choose Run as administrator. Type wmic diskdrive get size and press Enter. Finally, the total size of hard disk space in pure number is displayed in the figure below. Thus, this command prompt method to check total hard drive size is only recommended to advanced users. Regarding the topic "how to check total hard drive size", "how do I find out my hard drive storage size" or "how big is my hard drive", we gathered three ways for you to follow.

According to the detailed description of each section of the recommended tool, you should know that all the three ways are free to use, and all are able to display the total hard drive storage size clearly, but in different forms.

So, which way do you prefer to check the total hard drive storage size? Leave a Like on this page if we solved your case. Author Jean has been writing tech articles since she was graduated from university.

The output will be limited to that one drive Figure 2. Figure 2: How much space is on one particular drive?

You can also limit the reported fields shown in the df output. Available fields are:. The command for this would be:. The output of this command is quite easy to read Figure 3. Figure 3: Specifying what output to display for our drives.

Figure 4: We now know the source of our disk usage. Our next command is du. As you might expect, that stands for disk usage. The du command is quite different to the df command, in that it reports on directories and not drives. The output of the above command will display the size of every file in the directory Figure 5. Figure 5: The output of the du command on a specific directory. What if we want to know the total usage of a particular directory?

Fortunately, du can handle that task. On the same directory, the command would be:. Get the highlights in your inbox every week. Linux df command The df command stands for "disk-free," and shows available and used disk space on the Linux system.

The Linux Terminal. Check used disk space on Linux with du. Find out how much disk space you're using with the Linux du command. Seth Kenlon Red Hat. Use df to check free disk space on Linux. Find out how much Linux disk space you have left with the df command.