Monitoring of application or system disk utilization has always remained a top most and crucial responsibility of any IT engineer. In the IT world with various software’s , automation and tools it is very important to keep a track of disk utilization regularly.
Having said that, In this tutorial we will show you best commands and tools to work with your disk utilization. Please follow me along to read and see these commands and their usage.
Table of content
- Check Disk Space using disk free or disk filesystems command ( df )
- Check Disk Space using disk usage command ( du )
- Check Disk Usage using ls command
- Check Disk Usage using pydf command
- Check Disk Usage using Ncdu command( Ncurses Disk Usage )
- Check Disk Usage using duc command
- conclusion
Check Disk Space using disk free or disk filesystems command (df)
It stands for disk free. This command provides us information about the available space and used space on a file system. There are multiple parameters which can be passed along with this utility to provide additional outputs. Lets look at some of the commands from this utility.
- To see all disk space available on all the mounted file systems on ubuntu machine.
df
- To see all disk space available on all the mounted file systems on ubuntu machine in human readable format.
- You will notice a difference in this command output and a previous. The difference is instead of 1k-blocks you will see size which is human readable.
df -h
- To check the disk usage along with type of filesystem
df -T
- To check disk usage of particular Filesystem
df /dev/xvda1
- To check disk usage of multiple directories.
df -h /opt /var /etc /lib
- To check only Percent of used disk space
df -h --output=source,pcent
- To check data usage based on filesystem wise
df -h -t ext4
Check Disk Space using disk usage command ( du )
du command provides disk usage information. This command provides file and directories space utilization. Lets see some of the example .
- To check disk usage of directory
du /lib # Here we are taking lib directory
- To check disk usage of directory with different block size type .
- M for MB
- G for GB
- T for TB
du -BM /var
- To check disk usage according to the size
- Here s represents summarize
- Here k represents size in KB , you can use M, G or T and so on
- Here sort represents sort
- Here n represents in numerical order
- Here r represents in reverse order
du -sk /opt/* | sort -nr
Check Disk Usage using ls command
ls command is used of listing of files but also provides information about disk utilized by directories and files. Lets see some of these command.
- To list the files in human readable format.
ls -lh
- To list the file in descending order of size of files.
ls -ls
Check Disk Usage using pydf command
pydf is a python based command-line tool which is used to display disk usage with different colors. Lets dive into command now.
- To check the disk usage with pydf
pydf -h 
Check Disk Usage using Ncdu command (Ncurses Disk Usage)
Ncdu is a disk utility for Unix systems. This command is text-based user interface under the [n]curses programming library.Let us see a command from Ncdu
ncdu
Check Disk Usage using duc command
Duc is a command line utility which queries the disk usage database and also create, maintain and the database.
- Before we run a command using duc be sure to install duc package.
sudo apt install duc- duc is successfully installed , now lets now run a command
duc index /usr- To list the disk usage using duc command with user interface
duc ui /usr
Conclusion
There are various ways to identify and view disk usage in Linux or ubuntu operating system. In this tutorial we learnt and showed best commands and disk utilities to work with . Now are you are ready to troubleshoot disk usage issues or work with your files or application and identify the disk utilization.
Hope this tutorial gave you in depth understanding and best commands to work with disk usage . Hoping you never face any disk issues in your organization. Please share if you like.
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