How do I find the amount of free space on my hard drive?

Question

Is there a way to quickly check the amount of free / used disk space in Ubuntu?

I would assume you could right click on 'file system' in the file browser and choose 'properties' or something but there is no such option.

Answer 1

Open System Monitor from Dash and select the Filesystems tab.

Or alternatively open a Terminal and type:

df -h

Answer 2

gnome-system-monitor or df -h or lsblk

Other useful utilities are baobab.

Answer 3

There are a number of ways to do this.

• Enable the status bar in the View menu in Nautilus. This will place a bar at the bottom of all nautilus windows telling you the free space.

• Use the File Systems System Monitor to view a list of all disks and their free space.

• Use the Disk Usage Analyzer to get a listing of all directories on your system and how much free space they take up.

• Go to any folder in nautilus and right click the background. Open the properties window to check the free space.

• Run the command df -h.

Answer 4

I wrote a little hack for this with a command line and gui version. It's rather hard-coded, so may need some tweaks. Also, the gui version appears to use a proportional font that messes up the alignment of the displayed output. These scripts could be put in your path somewhere (like in $HOME/bin) and you can create an icon for the gui script on your desktop or panel.

#!/bin/bash
## jdf - Copyleft 04/25/2009 - JPmicrosystems - GPL
## Free space on disk
## Custom df output
## Human readable (-h)
## sorted by file system name

## Make a temporary file and put the following awk program in it
AWK=$(/bin/mktemp -q /tmp/jdf.XXXXXX)

## PROG is quoted to prevent all shell expansions
## in the awk program
cat <<'PROG' > ${AWK}
## Won't work if mount points are longer than 21 characters

BEGIN {
  ## Use fixed length fields to avoid problems with
  ## mount point or file system names with embedded blanks
  FIELDWIDTHS = "11 11 6 6 5 5 21"
  printf "\n%s\n\n", "                    Available Disk Space"
  printf     "%s\n", "Mount Point          Avail Size  Used  Use%  Filesystem Type"
}

## Eliminate some filesystems
## That are usually not of interest
## anything not starting with a /

! /^\// { next }

## Rearrange the columns and print

{
  TYP=$2
  gsub("^ *", "", TYP)
  printf "%-21s%6s%6s%5s%5s %s%s\n", $7, $5, $3, $4, $6, $1, TYP
}

END { print "" }
PROG

df -hT | tail -n +2 | sort | gawk -f ${AWK}

rm -f ${AWK}

Sample output:

                   Available Disk Space

Mount Point          Avail Size  Used  Use%  Filesystem Type
/                      22G  30G  6.6G   24%  /dev/sda6  ext4    
/media/dataspace       44G 155G  105G   71%  /dev/sda8  ext3    
/home                 5.5G  32G   25G   82%  /dev/sda9  ext3    

Gui version:

#!/bin/bash
jdf | zenity  --title "Available Disk Space" --text-info --width=500 --height=300 --timeout=60

New Gui Version with fonts fixed using yad

#!/bin/bash

jdf | yad  --fontname="DejaVu Sans Mono 12" --title "Available Disk Space" --text-info --width=650 --height=300

Answer 5

Using dconf-editor or gsettings (sudo apt-get install dconf-tools) you can enable the default behavior of the status bar.

Type this on your terminal to enable the status bar by default

gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.window-state start-with-status-bar true

Type this on your terminal to disable the status bar by default

gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.window-state start-with-status-bar false

After that you will have the statusbar opened by default on Nautilus, no need to run anything else.

Answer 6

Type in disk usage analyzer in dash.