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Is there a command line tool which shows in real time how much space remains on my external hard drive?

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    The answer depends on the file system. For example df can not show the correct values for btrfs (yet). Could you add this information to your question?
    – Jonas Stein
    Commented May 3, 2016 at 0:43

5 Answers 5

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As Julie said, you can use df to display free space, passing it either the mount point or the device name:

df --human-readable /home
df --human-readable /dev/sda1

You'll get something like this:

Filesystem Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1  833G  84G  749G  10%  /home

To run it continuously, use watch. Default update interval is 2 seconds, but you can tweak that with --interval:

watch --interval=60 df --human-readable /dev/sda1
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df is a simple command line utility that shows you disk usage, including free space.

Check man df for details.

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    I currently use df -h, which gives me the required info as and when I type df -h. I was after something more live or real time, i.e. something which keeps updating the terminal automatically, so I don't have to type in a command to check.
    – oshirowanen
    Commented May 2, 2016 at 17:12
  • @oshirowanen You can use watch, and it will run it over and over and show you fresh output (normally every two seconds). Keep in mind that only one program can update the terminal at a time under normal conditions (i.e. if you don't want to make a complete mess of your screen), so if you want to do other things at the same time you need to dedicate a terminal to it or run it in something like screen, tmux, or dvtm to split the terminal into multiple virtual terminals.
    – Random832
    Commented May 2, 2016 at 19:52
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If you don't like the idea of dedicating a whole terminal to watching the output of df, you could consider a tool such as conky. There are countless examples of using conky to monitor everything from HDD usage, HDD temp, ram usage, local weather, news headlines... you name it.

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Just use the following:

watch -d df
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  • You should edit this answer to include an explanation of how this differs from the accepted answer - which already provides explanations on how to use the df and watch commands.
    – Anthony Geoghegan
    Commented Jun 8, 2018 at 8:57
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Using the excellent answer provided above by Alexander Batischev, and this one by Ralf Friedl, I combined them with "sort" a la this link for this command:

watch -d -n 60 'df -H /dev/sd[a-z][0-9] | sort -r -k 5 -i'

That will let you watch all of your hard drives in a terminal, updated every minute, sorted by percentage of space used.

I don't know how much this answer may add to what is already here (this is my very first answer), but I thought I would put it here, in case someone comes looking for exactly what I wanted to do, which is how I ended up on this question in the first place. Thought I would try to save someone else the effort of having to figure out how to put "watch", "df" and "sort" together, if I could.

FYI, I used regex instead of just "/dev/sd*" because my system also shows several "udev" entries, which I didn't need or want to see. The command as written above hides those and only shows hard drives.

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