How to get disk usage from command line?

Question

How can I get the current disk usage (in %) of my hard drive from the command line?

Solution 1

By using the df command.

Here's an example output:

$ df
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1            303537496  27537816 260580948  10% /
none                    950788       252    950536   1% /dev
none                    959516       232    959284   1% /dev/shm
none                    959516       388    959128   1% /var/run
none                    959516         0    959516   0% /var/lock

Also take a look at its manpage.

Solution 2

ncdu

Works well from the command line. It's ncurses-based and interactive.
You can install it with sudo apt-get install ncdu.

Alternatives

• Top ten: du -shx * | sort -rh | head -10
• If you want more fine grained disk usage, you should take a look at the answers here.

Comments

[Ehtesh Choudhury]

Now I wonder if there's some commandline equivalent of kdirstat or baobab.

[belacqua]

superuser.com/questions/9847/…

[Oli]

df -m will show things in megabytes, df -h will show you in the largest possible unit.

[Peter T.]

Install this via sudo apt install ncdu

[G Trawo]

I liked the alternatives. You have to be in the directory you are looking for the large files. But I found it easy to spot the culprit this way without having to install anything.

[Michael Plautz]

du -shx * | sort -rh | head -10 is a lifesaver! Especially great if you are on a small test server, you have run out of space, and do not already have a fancy utility installed to fix your problems.

[Marco C.]

on CentOS sudo yum install ncdu

[dvhirst]

The Top ten item above is very helpful, however, it omits hidden directories. Is there an easy way to include them?