You are going to find many tools online that can check the disk space usage for Unix based operating systems such as Linux. However, the most used one is a powerful built-in command called "df", which is short for "disk filesystem". You may use it without the need to install it, and by doing so you are going to receive a full review of the disk space utilization of the file system. In this article, we are going to go over a few examples of how you can use this command to check the disk usage of your Web Hosting Account.
Here is an example of the command when used without any flags:
[root@ger1 ~]# df Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/sda 82051600 42098560 35768712 55% / /dev/loop0 3076124 21868 2894668 1% /tmp /dev/sdc 82438552 12400616 65827248 16% /backup
In this state, it is quite unreadable as the data is in bytes. It is a common practice to read such type of information either in MegaBytes or GigaBytes. To display the information in a human-readable format, please use the "-h" flag after the command which stands for "Human Readable":
[root@ger1 ~]# df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda 79G 41G 35G 55% / /dev/loop0 3.0G 22M 2.8G 1% /tmp /dev/sdc 79G 12G 63G 16% /backup
As you can see, it is far more understandable, and you can get a better idea of the disk utilization on your server. This command can serve one more purpose - display the inode status of the server (file count). To do that, please type it in, using the "-i" flag, which stands for "inodes".
[root@ger1 ~]# df -i Filesystem Inodes IUsed IFree IUse% Mounted on /dev/sda 5088000 1223372 3864628 25% / /dev/loop0 199600 1803 197797 1% /tmp /dev/sdc 5242880 295 5242585 1% /backup
Again, without the "-h" option, the information is going to be somewhat challenging to read, therefore we recommend adding the "-h" flag. When applied, one thousand (1000) is going to change to "1K", one million (1 000 000) is going to change to "1M" giving you a much better idea:
[root@ger1 ~]# df -ih Filesystem Inodes IUsed IFree IUse% Mounted on /dev/sda 4.9M 1.2M 3.7M 25% / /dev/loop0 195K 1.8K 194K 1% /tmp /dev/sdc 5.0M 295 5.0M 1% /backup