Comments on: 10 Commands to Check Disk Partitions and Disk Space on Linux

By: Glenn Cheatham

Glenn Cheatham — Thu, 30 Sep 2021 16:08:06 +0000

Nice article and some great info also in the comments. However, there is errata in your description of Fdisk, which I believe comes from your understandable lack of in-depth knowledge, probably through the fact that very few individuals get their noses rubbed in physical-to-virtual conversions these days. Your sentence: However it does not report the size of each partitions. Is inaccurate. Fdisk does report the size of each partition, sda1-sda8 in the example.

In the sda disk overview it states:
Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders, total 976773168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

The confusing part is that in the detail section, Partition sizes are reported in “Blocks” which are refered to as “Sectors in the overview section. In this case, the Sector Size is 512 Bytes, so a disk block is also 512 Bytes.
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 63 146801969 73400953+ 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2 146802031 976771071 414984520+ f W95 Ext’d (LBA)
/dev/sda5 146802033 351614654 102406311 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda6 351614718 556427339 102406311 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 556429312 560427007 1998848 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda8 560429056 976771071 208171008 83 Linux

Thus, sda1 is 73400953 (* 512 byte blocks) = 37,581,287,936 bytes, or (divided by 1,048,576) is 35,840MB. And there is a simpler formula to apply that is “good enough for government work”. Simply imagine comma separators to identify the millions and billions, chopping off hundreds and thousands and divide by 2, which most computer people can still do in their heads. 73400953 -> 73 ,400,953, –> 73 2 = 36 and change. And swap (sda7) is about 1GB.

(I mis-spent a lot of time in my youth recalculating powers of 2 and multiples of 512, usually while waiting for massive disk operations to complete…)

By: James Rodgers

James Rodgers — Sun, 01 Aug 2021 14:50:33 +0000

Thank you for this great summary of relevant commands and also showing whether SU privileges are needed or not.

By: Ankit Gaur

Ankit Gaur — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 09:15:43 +0000

Good article. Thanks for writing this !!.
I’d also suggest including “ncdu” (stands for ncurses du) – https://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu – in this as it’s quite useful in knowing the disk usage on the terminal in a graphical way

By: itall

itall — Wed, 11 Nov 2020 18:42:33 +0000

pydf hands down the best alternative if you want a quick glance at disk usage!

By: Silver Moon

Silver Moon — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 04:35:39 +0000

In reply to Abdely. what output does it show when you try to run pydf and hwinfo ?

By: Silver Moon

Silver Moon — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 04:33:46 +0000

In reply to Spencer. glad that you found it helpful.

By: Silver Moon

Silver Moon — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 04:33:16 +0000

In reply to Scott. thanks for mentioning. both are useful tools.

By: Silver Moon

Silver Moon — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 04:30:43 +0000

In reply to David Pope. glad to know that. thanks for the comment.

By: Silver Moon

Silver Moon — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 04:30:06 +0000

In reply to ترمینت.

Hardinfo is a GUI tool that shows hardware information including disk drives and partitions..
On ubuntu it can be installed with the following command

sudo apt-get install hardinfo

Another tool is gparted.
It is a partition management tool, but can also be used to list the disk drives and partitions

By: Michels

Michels — Tue, 24 Mar 2020 16:55:55 +0000

Very useful, thank you!

By: ترمینت

ترمینت — Sat, 22 Feb 2020 04:39:57 +0000

very useful,
How about GUI tools?

By: David Pope

David Pope — Tue, 17 Dec 2019 01:38:52 +0000

Well done — I learned something!

By: Thomas Edisson

Thomas Edisson — Sat, 14 Dec 2019 20:29:42 +0000

Very useful. Thank you for your effort.

By: Shivam Yadav

Shivam Yadav — Mon, 27 May 2019 04:15:51 +0000

Detailed and to the point post. Thanks A Ton!

By: carloque

carloque — Sat, 20 Apr 2019 16:48:50 +0000

Very useful

By: Bit2easy

Bit2easy — Fri, 24 Aug 2018 09:35:45 +0000

thanks, it was very usefull

By: Scott

Scott — Wed, 06 Jun 2018 00:17:20 +0000

Two others: gparted and lshw.

By: Adeniyi

Adeniyi — Mon, 21 May 2018 03:57:24 +0000

Good one, detailed information.

By: Spencer

Spencer — Mon, 30 Apr 2018 04:11:16 +0000

Spent over an hour reading websites trying to figure out 1 of the many commands you have here….. THANK YOU!!!!!

By: TJ

TJ — Fri, 26 Jan 2018 15:16:01 +0000

Thx.. some really good info