PeterIt's time for another command line tip today - and that is how to see how much disk space you have left overall on a particular partition.
It's always good to know how much space you have left, especially when you're about to leap into a backup, wget a big file or do some other process which needs a lot of space.
For this reason, there's a great little command called df. Run it on its own and it will show you how many 1 kilobyte blocks are available, are used and how many overall can fit into your partitions. On my system, this gives:
$ df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda8 18844840 10474876 7397232 59% /
tmpfs 516436 0 516436 0% /dev/shm
/dev/hda7 14112620 10267796 3127928 77% /home
/dev/hda1 26627704 11543388 15084316 44% /windows/C
/dev/hdb1 31728896 21759680 9969216 69% /windows/D
/dev/hdb6 16386268 13978836 2407432 86% /windows/E
While this is good, I usually find it much more useful to have the output in a human-readable format. For this reason, you can give df the -h switch and it will do just that (by displaying the number of megabytes or gigabytes instead).
$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda8 18G 10G 7.1G 59% /
tmpfs 505M 0 505M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/hda7 14G 9.8G 3.0G 77% /home
/dev/hda1 26G 12G 15G 44% /windows/C
/dev/hdb1 31G 21G 9.6G 69% /windows/D
/dev/hdb6 16G 14G 2.3G 86% /windows/E
And if you ever start getting strange errors and 'No space left on device', it might be a good idea to check df (and then start frantically moving and deleting files). I have had that happen to me before. :)
