Checking disk usage in linux

Posted under » Linux on 30 Sep 2020

To check disk usage

df command
Shows the amount of disk space used and available on Linux file systems.

du command
is a standard Unix/Linux command, used to check the information of disk usage of files and directories on a machine. The du command has many parameter options that can be used to get the results in many formats. The du command also displays the files and directory sizes in a recursively manner

Know which folders take a lot of space.

df -H

Read related command 'lsblk' and 'lshw -C disk'.

du  /home/

To get the summary of a grand total disk usage size of an directory use the option “-s”

Using “-a” flag with “du” command displays the disk usage of all the files and directories.

The output of the above command displays the number of disk blocks in the /home/ directory along with its sub-directories.

If there are many subdiretories, often you just want to see a bit.

-h stands for human readable format but if you want to know the file name in bytes, then

du -b file.jpg

To sort according to size and list only 10 rows

du -a /etc | sort -n -r | head -n 10

We often use the diff – to show you the difference between two computer files; compares files line by line but you can also use diff to compare file diretories.

diff -q directory-1/ directory-2/

You can alias the location of directory in case one of your main hardisk is full.