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7 Linux df Command Examples

df command in Linux provides disk space usage information of your file systems. Even if you already know about this command, probably one of the examples mentioned below might be new to you.

A sample output from df command is as follows:

$ df
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1            132239776   6210884 119311504   5% /
tmpfs                  4021876         0   4021876   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sdb2             30969600    117740  29278696   1% /home/oracle
/dev/sdc1            576310180     71232 546964104   1% /home/data

So we see that df gives some valuable information on the file systems, their mount points, their memory usage etc.

1. Display Information of all the File Systems

If the disk usage of all the file systems is required then use ‘-a’ option:

$ df -a
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1            132239776   6210892 119311496   5% /
proc                         0         0         0   -  /proc
sysfs                        0         0         0   -  /sys
devpts                       0         0         0   -  /dev/pts
tmpfs                  4021876         0   4021876   0% /dev/shm
none                         0         0         0   -  /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc
/dev/sdb2             30969600    117740  29278696   1% /home/oracle
/dev/sdc1            576310180     71232 546964104   1% /home/data

So we see that in the output, details of all the file systems and their memory usage is there.

2. Specify the Memory Block Size

If you see the output in point 1 above, the second column gives the memory of file system in memory blocks of 1k. df command provides an option through which we can change the size of memory block in the output. Use option -B for this:

$ df -B 100
Filesystem         100B-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1            1354135307  63599535 1221749720   5% /
tmpfs                 41184011         0  41184011   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sdb2            317128704   1205658 299813848   1% /home/oracle
/dev/sdc1            5901416244    729416 5600912425   1% /home/data

So you see that we specified a block size of 100 and in the output (second column) block size of 100 is displayed.

3. Print Human Readable Sizes

We are used to reading the memory in terms of gigabytes, megabytes, etc as its easy to read and remember. df command also provides an option ‘-h’ to print the memory statistics in human readable format.

Option -h stands for “human” readable format. As shown in the output below, G is used for gigabytes and M is used for megabytes.

$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1             127G  6.0G  114G   5% /
tmpfs                 3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sdb2              30G  115M   28G   1% /home/oracle
/dev/sdc1             550G   70M  522G   1% /home/data

4. Display Grand Total in the Output

Till now we have seen that only disk usage statistics of individual file systems is produced. If we want to display a grand total of every column then we can use the ‘–total’ flag. Here is an example:

$ df -h --total
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1             127G  6.0G  114G   5% /
tmpfs                 3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sdb2              30G  115M   28G   1% /home/oracle
/dev/sdc1             550G   70M  522G   1% /home/data
total                 710G  6.2G  668G   1%

So we see that a new row ‘total’ at the end of the output was produced.

5. List Inodes (Instead of Block Usage)

Till now we have seen that df prints the second column as total memory blocks. If information in terms of inode is desired then df provides an option ‘-i’ for this.

$ df -i
Filesystem            Inodes   IUsed   IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/sda1            8396800   65397 8331403    1% /
tmpfs                1005469       1 1005468    1% /dev/shm
/dev/sdb2            1966560    2517 1964043    1% /home/oracle
/dev/sdc1            36593664      11 36593653    1% /home/data

So we see that information in terms of inodes is displayed.

6. Print File System Type

If you wish to print the type of file system in the output, use option ‘-T’.

$ df -T
Filesystem    Type   1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1     ext4   132239776   6210892 119311496   5% /
tmpfs        tmpfs     4021876         0   4021876   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sdb2     ext2    30969600    117740  29278696   1% /home/oracle
/dev/sdc1     ext2   576310180     71232 546964104   1% /home/data

In the above output, we can see all the file systems along with their type is displayed. Apart from using df -T to identify file system, there are 4 other methods to identify the file system types.

7. Include/Exclude Certain File System Type

You can also display file systems that belongs to certain type. For example, the following command displays only ext2 file systems. types.

$ df -t ext2
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb2             30969600    117740  29278696   1% /home/oracle
/dev/sdc1            576310180     71232 546964104   1% /home/data

You can also display file systems that doesn’t belongs to certain type. For example, the following command displays all other file systems except ext2. This is exactly opposite to the above -t option.

$ df -x ext2
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1            132239776   6210896 119311492   5% /
tmpfs                  4021876         0   4021876   0% /dev/shm
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Comments on this entry are closed.

  • kumarbka May 21, 2012, 4:33 am

    Nice info..

  • Jalal Hajigholamali May 21, 2012, 6:45 am

    Hi,
    Thanks a lot
    –total is not available on old “df” command

  • bob May 21, 2012, 8:03 am

    good job. thanks. I appreciate it when you expand out the meaning of the options. For example “df -h” and you explain that -h is for “human readable”. A lot of times we have difficulty remembering the option because we don’t remember what it stands for. Expanding the option helps us remember. This is something to keep in mind for your future columns.

  • J.O. May 21, 2012, 8:06 am

    df .

    df followed by a dot reports which file system cwd is currently.

  • Bryan Sutherland May 21, 2012, 10:52 am

    Thanks for pointing out a couple of new flags to add to my df use. I wanted to add one of my top flags as well (-P) which forces POSIX compliant output and makes reading df output when using LVM much easier to read:
    df -hP

  • sri May 21, 2012, 11:23 am

    thanx a lot…. its so helpful

  • Astorre May 21, 2012, 5:33 pm

    Always useful !!! πŸ™‚

  • Mehdi Esmaeilian May 21, 2012, 11:15 pm

    Thanks,
    It’s usefull.

  • Himanshu May 21, 2012, 11:51 pm

    Thank you all for your valuable comments!!

  • anonymous May 22, 2012, 2:50 am

    df – h –total is not displaying, what is version of df ?

  • Himanshu May 22, 2012, 11:24 am

    @anonymous
    I am using version 7.4

  • Bryan Sutherland May 23, 2012, 8:31 am

    Anonymous, is there a space in your command? Also, can you tell me what distro and df version (df –version) you are using?

  • Vasudev May 24, 2012, 9:36 pm

    Thanx…. really useful to every one.

  • Aravindan May 25, 2012, 7:47 pm

    HI Anonymous, its :

      df -h --total 
    

    you have left one hyphen(-).kindly check there will be 2 hyphen coming before total…

  • Fame May 29, 2012, 3:31 am

    df -h –total

    You can’t use –total switch in RHEL/CentOS 4xx and RHEL/CentOS 5.xx.
    I just tried , but you can definitely use in RHEL/CentOS 6.2.

    ( Which means you can’t use df’s switch “–total” in older version of coreutils-5.97-xxx . The core util found on CentOS 6.2 is coreutils-8.4-16.el6.x86_64. ).

  • Monali May 29, 2012, 11:00 pm

    Thanks a lot… It is very helpfull

  • Pascal June 3, 2012, 3:18 am

    If you want the output of df shown in a neat table use: df | column -t

    To have all partitions sorted by percentage of used disk space (in increasing order) type:
    df -Ph | sort -nk5
    Options:
    -n: sort by entire number not only the first digit, so 5% comes after say 1% and not 12%
    -k5: sort using column 5 (in our case percentage of disk space used)

    Hope that helps

  • israel June 7, 2012, 7:57 am

    Thank you very much for your realy valuable articles .

  • dhanda vijay August 20, 2012, 6:53 am

    superb jobs done by thegeekstuff

  • yunus September 12, 2012, 12:40 am

    Can anyone clarify why the df command does not show any output on my VPS (Centos 5.7)

  • Ashish Singhi August 19, 2013, 11:58 pm

    Thanks, helped a lot πŸ™‚

  • Jakletti March 20, 2014, 11:25 am

    Hi,

    I would like to know about df little bit internal.
    when we execute command `df` on CLI, from where it will read the information.

  • Soham April 3, 2014, 5:09 am

    Hi,

    The df -i command is not working in solaris. Please help.

  • Arun January 20, 2015, 4:00 pm

    Hi Ramesh,
    This is regarding tmpfs query.Kindly find the below details and help on this .

    we have server with 7 Gb and Tmpfs is 4 Gb. No process/application is using more memory but we are facing memory issue. And it is not a Db server

    Questions :
    1) In free -g we have only 3 gb free (buffer+caches is 2 gb and cache is 1 gb). and what about the reaming memory ?
    2) configuring tmpfs is good or not in linux server (without DB (oracle) installed on it)
    3) If we configured tmpfs ,it will directly took it from physical ram or not ? if yes means, then it will be shown as used in free command or not ?

    Kindly help on this and find the below details from that server .

    1) cat /etc/fstab->tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
    2) df -h –> tmpfs 3.9G 0 3.9G 0% /dev/shm
    3) free -m
    total used free shared buffers cached
    Mem: 7873 7240 632 0 119 1640
    -/+ buffers/cache: 5480 2392
    Swap: 4095 0 4095

    ##free -g
    total used free shared buffers cached
    Mem: 7 7 0 0 0 1
    -/+ buffers/cache: 5 2
    Swap: 3 0 3
    4) from top β€”
    top – 21:01:04 up 332 days, 19 min, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
    Tasks: 249 total, 2 running, 247 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
    Cpu(s): 0.2%us, 0.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 99.5%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
    Mem: 8062532k total, 7415264k used, 647268k free, 122792k buffers
    Swap: 4194296k total, 4k used, 4194292k free, 1679428k cached

    PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
    32746 UH00006 30 10 144m 7216 2328 S 0.0 0.1 1:53.21 pandora_agent
    1917 root 20 0 245m 5404 884 S 0.0 0.1 1:26.54 rsyslogd
    23397 root 20 0 169m 4120 2236 S 0.0 0.1 4:45.63 httpd
    2413 cimsrvr 20 0 382m 3804 2088 S 0.0 0.0 2:51.21 cimservermain
    21780 root 20 0 95824 3788 2864 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.14 sshd
    2351 postfix 20 0 78972 3400 2468 S 0.0 0.0 1:21.00 qmgr
    22873 postfix 20 0 78800 3244 2416 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.02 pickup
    2344 root 20 0 78720 3200 2348 S 0.0 0.0 5:34.63 master
    18650 apache 20 0 169m 3104 1160 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 httpd

    5) Top memory usage
    ps -A –sort -rss -o comm,pmem | head -n 11
    COMMAND %MEM
    pandora_agent 0.0
    rsyslogd 0.0
    httpd 0.0
    cimservermain 0.0
    sshd 0.0
    qmgr 0.0
    pickup 0.0
    master 0.0
    httpd 0.0
    httpd 0.0

    This is the sample servers , we have lots of servers like this .

    Regards,
    Arun J