13 Jan 2016 / 1 min read

Unix - Free disk space, file and folder sizes

Hi everyone, below I'll list a few everyday commands to find the free disk space and to get the size of files and folders in the…

> Archived article from 2016, from the old nutellino.it: commands and versions may be out of date.

> Machine translation from Italian: the original is here.

# archive# cli-utility

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Unix - Free disk space, file and folder sizes

Hi everyone, below I'll list a few everyday commands to find the free disk space and to get the size of files and folders in the current directory.

The first command is very simple, it gives you an overview of the filesystem and its space.

bash

df -l

With this command you see, for each mount point, the percentage of space used and the total and available space in kilobytes

Screenshot 2016-01-13 at 13.28.27

The second command, just as simple, shows the size in megabytes of the files in a folder.

bash

du -sm *

Example output:

Screenshot 2016-01-13 at 13.32.34

And if we want output that gives the size in megabytes, sorted from largest to smallest, we run this chain of commands

bash

du -m * | sort -nr

There are lots of other command combinations, but these are the ones I usually use 🙂