Linux Commands for Checking How Much Space Is Left on Disk

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1. Overview

Keeping tabs on available disk space is essential for the Linux system. When the machine runs low on storage, we risk experiencing performance issues and potential errors.

Luckily, Linux offers several packages that come with standard tools to help us quickly analyze how much free space we have left and what space is in use. For instance, the df command provides a system-wide overview of disk usage.

Also, these commands work across most standard Linux shells, including Bash, Zsh, and others.

In this tutorial, we’ll learn some Linux commands for checking disk space.

2. df Command

The df command (short for disk free) is a common starting point for determining how much space is left on the disk.

In its most basic form, df displays the available and used space on the Linux machine’s various filesystems:

$ df

Filesystem     1K-blocks    Used Available Use% Mounted on
overlay         61202244 2747816  55313104   5% /
tmpfs              65536       0     65536   0% /dev
shm                65536       0     65536   0% /dev/shm
/dev/vda1       61202244 2747816  55313104   5% /etc/hosts
tmpfs            2008640       0   2008640   0% /sys/firmware