Linux df command examples

The df command comes from disk free and it is used in order to find out the amount of free disk space available on Linux and Unix-like systems. It is also useful in order to understand the filesystems that have been mounted.

Using the df command is quite straightforward. Just type df in your terminal or df with the required arguments. (example: df -i or df -h etc.)

df command examples

df

Just using df without any arguments will display the amount of free space on each currently mounted file system. You can also specify a file name argument to see the free space on a specific mounted file system.

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df -h

The -h argument outputs the disk usages and values in human-readable form.

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df -i

The -i argument is useful to see the number of free inodes.

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df /path/to/directory/or/file

This allows you to show the filesystem and its disk usage of the given file or directory.

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df -x tmpfs

If you’d like to show everything bug exclude the specified type, just use the above example with the -x argument followed by the name of the filesystem.

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And of course, you can even combine arguments, like adding -h to other commands to get human readable forms.

df -x tmpfs -h

df /dev/sdc1 -h

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df command columns

Here’s what each column means when the df command outputs stuff:

Filesystem	Size	used	Available	Percentage used	Mounted on
the name of the disk partition	total size of that file system	the amount of space used in that file system	total amount of space available in that file system	the percentage of available space	the directory in which the file system appears

That’s about it!

And that’s about it regarding the df command. If you found this small post useful, share it! It might help other people too!