Df
df - DISK FREE; Report file system disk space.
Df shows the available sizes on your disk partition. Tells you what percentage of the disk is occupied. Shows you what's mounted.
Contents
How To Use Df
Basic Uses
df df -ah $ df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on devtmpfs 3.7G 0 3.7G 0% /dev tmpfs 3.7G 0 3.7G 0% /dev/shm tmpfs 3.7G 213M 3.5G 6% /run tmpfs 3.7G 0 3.7G 0% /sys/fs/cgroup /dev/nvme0n1p2 10G 7.0G 3.1G 70% / /dev/nvme2n1p2 4.8G 329M 4.3G 8% /home/ardika /dev/nvme1n1p1 188G 5.0G 175G 3% /var/log/important_app_logs /dev/nvme2n1p1 4.8G 205M 4.4G 5% /home/ec2-user tmpfs 753M 0 753M 0% /run/user/1000
-h, --human-readable; print sizes in human readable format (e.g., 1K 234M 2G)
-a, --all; include pseudo, duplicate, inaccessible file systems.
Inodes
-i, --inodes; list inode information instead of block usage
$ df -i Filesystem Inodes IUsed IFree IUse% Mounted on devtmpfs 957312 322 956990 1% /dev tmpfs 963252 1 963251 1% /dev/shm tmpfs 963252 467 962785 1% /run tmpfs 963252 16 963236 1% /sys/fs/cgroup /dev/nvme0n1p2 5241792 134933 5106859 3% / /dev/nvme2n1p2 327680 13184 314496 5% /home/ardika /dev/nvme1n1p1 12517376 16 12517360 1% /var/log/important_app_logs /dev/nvme2n1p1 327680 6024 321656 2% /home/ec2-user tmpfs 963252 1 963251 1% /run/user/1000
In the above example, the root partition (/dev/nvme0n1p2) has 5,241,792 total inodes, but only 134,933 are used. Which means you can create another 5,106,859 on that file system.
In the case where 100% of your inodes are used, only a few options:
- You can try to identify a large number of files that you can delete or move to another file system.
- you can possibly archive a group of files into a tar archive.
- you can back up the files on your current file system, reformat it with more inodes, and copy the files back.
Why df -h seem to show less than the actual size of the volume
the system actually takes up a small amount of disk space. You would see that the storage device showing the 2.8T storage device in "lsblk" is showing as 2.7T under "df -h."
This is because some of the storage is hidden in the different units of measurement used to report disk capacity. How this space is reported and used varies by filesystem and by tools, as well. I've found a great article breaking down essentially what happens to the "missing" storage, and why it is "missing" (This is an article from Red Hat, but is also relevant to most of, if not all Linux operating systems); [1]