Check free disk space for current partition in bash

Question

Yes:

df -k .

for the current directory.

df -k /some/dir

if you want to check a specific directory.

You might also want to check out the stat(1) command if your system has it. You can specify output formats to make it easier for your script to parse. Here's a little example:

$ echo $(($(stat -f --format="%a*%S" .)))

1. df command : Report file system disk space usage
2. du command : Estimate file space usage

Type df -h or df -k to list free disk space:

 $ df -h

OR

 $ df -k

du shows how much space one or more files or directories is using:

 $ du -sh

The -s option summarizes the space a directory is using and -h option provides Human-readable output.

I think this should be a comment or an edit to ThinkingMedia's answer on this very question (Check free disk space for current partition in bash), but I am not allowed to comment (not enough rep) and my edit has been rejected (reason: "this should be a comment or an answer"). So please, powers of the SO universe, don't damn me for repeating and fixing someone else's "answer". But someone on the internet was wrong!™ and they wouldn't let me fix it.

The code

  df --output=avail -h "$PWD" | sed '1d;s/[^0-9]//g'

has a substantial flaw: Yes, it will output 50G free as 50 -- but it will also output 5.0M free as 50 or 3.4G free as 34 or 15K free as 15.

To create a script with the purpose of checking for a certain amount of free disk space you have to know the unit you're checking against. Remove it (as sed does in the example above) the numbers don't make sense anymore.

If you actually want it to work, you will have to do something like:

FREE=`df -k --output=avail "$PWD" | tail -n1`   # df -k not df -h
if [[ $FREE -lt 10485760 ]]; then               # 10G = 10*1024*1024k
     # less than 10GBs free!
fi;

Also for an installer to df -k $INSTALL_TARGET_DIRECTORY might make more sense than df -k "$PWD". Finally, please note that the --output flag is not available in every version of df / linux.

df --output=avail -B 1 "$PWD" |tail -n 1

you get size in bytes this way.