How to check disk space usage on Ubuntu

This article i will show you how to check disk space usage on ubuntu via command line, there is a special program that can do this, a command line tool called 'df' can show you disk space usage on ubuntu.

You can check your disk space usage by running 'df' on the command line, like this:

df

kernelpanic@ubuntu16:~$ df
Filesystem     1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2      952583092 875410860  28760740  97% /
none                   4         0         4   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
udev             4050676         4   4050672   1% /dev
tmpfs             812296      1380    810916   1% /run
none                5120         0      5120   0% /run/lock
none             4061460     82780   3978680   3% /run/shm
none              102400        48    102352   1% /run/user
/dev/sda1         523248      3428    519820   1% /boot/efi

The output above is hard to read, specially on the 'Used' and 'Available' part, because that's the part that most important for us to know.

By default 'df' will show the number in bytes, but we can tell 'df' to output in GB or MB format, to show in GB format, simply add parameter -h, 'h' stand for 'human readable' format.

df -h

kernelpanic@ubuntu16:~$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2       909G  835G   28G  97% /
none            4.0K     0  4.0K   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
udev            3.9G  4.0K  3.9G   1% /dev
tmpfs           794M  1.4M  792M   1% /run
none            5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
none            3.9G   95M  3.8G   3% /run/shm
none            100M   48K  100M   1% /run/user
/dev/sda1       511M  3.4M  508M   1% /boot/efi

To output in MB format, you can add parameter -m, like this:

df -m

Lastly if you just want a specific place to be output, you can do something like this:

df -h /

kernelpanic@ubuntu16:~$ df -h /
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2       909G  835G   28G  97% /