How to View Disk Space Used in Ubuntu
The transition from the Windows GUI to the Ubuntu terminal environment can be a daunting one. Nothing is familiar anymore, and even the simplest tasks are all of a sudden difficult. One such task is looking at your used or available disk space. Don’t worry; finding your disk space in Ubunutu is actually quite easy. Here is how to view your total disk space used in Ubuntu.
How to view Total Disk Space Used in Ubuntu
To get the total disk space used in Ubuntu, we will use two commands. The first command will give us our filesystem. We will then use that information to get our used and available space left. Our two commands will be fdisk and df.
Step 1: Find your Filesystem
First, let’s look up our filesystem. In your terminal type
fdisk -l
The terminal will spit out a bunch of stuff, but we are interested in the last bit. You will get a list of “Devices” the one with the largest “Size” will be the one we are interested in. In our example, it’s “/dev/vda1“
Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/vda1 227328 167772126 167544799 79.9G Linux filesystem
/dev/vda14 2048 10239 8192 4M BIOS boot
/dev/vda15 10240 227327 217088 106M Microsoft basic data
Step 2: Check Used and Available Space
Next, we will look up our used and available space. In your terminal type
df -h [FILE SYSTEM FROM STEP 1]
We will use the “Device” we found from the previous step in our second argument here. So for our example, we will enter df -h /dev/vda1
Your filesystem argument will likely be different.
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/vda1 78G 46G 32G 59% /
Now we have our desired information. You can see the total size of your disk along with the currently used space, available space, and percentage used.
Of course, now that we know our filesystem, we can skip the first step in the future. We can also use the df command without the filesystem argument. This will give us multiple filesystems. You can find the one you are interested in from the list and see the same information.
df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 1.9G 0 1.9G 0% /dev
tmpfs 395M 1.6M 393M 1% /run
/dev/vda1 78G 46G 32G 59% /
tmpfs 2.0G 0 2.0G 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
tmpfs 2.0G 0 2.0G 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
That’s all there is to find your used or available disk space in Ubuntu. We hope you found this guide helpful and informative!
