Terminal Thursday: Disk Space With df And du
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If you’ve been avoiding Murphy’s Terminal lessons because they look like a lot of work go ahead and try this one. Easy. Then go back and look at the other Terminal snippets.
The screencast shows you how to see how much space you have on your disk. Or disks. You can focus your effort to see why a certain folder is so big, even if it’s stuffed full of other folders.
There are other ways to accomplish these tasks, like using the Inspector. But the Terminal is a powerful tool. So go ahead and take a look.
We’ll use df to see how much space is left on our disk. And we’ll use du to check out files and directories. The du utility can show us how much space each file takes up and provide subtotals for directories.
Click for more Terminal screencasts.
20. January 2007 at 1:05 pm :
Just to complete your nice screencast, i belive that ‘df’ stand for ‘Disk Free” and du stands for ‘Disk Usage’, makes it easier to remember the commands.
Tip : you can use CTRL+L to clear the screen, it’s a common shell shortcut.
20. January 2007 at 3:02 pm :
Thanks Frank, didn’t know about CTRL-L.
I like CTRL-U when I want to clear the line I’ve started typing.
-Murph