1. Overview

One of the most common administrative tasks while using Linux is finding out the disk space usage in our system. The most common command-line utilities to find the free disk space usage are the df (Disk Free) and du (Disk Usage commands).

In this tutorial, we will have a look at the common scenarios and usage of the du and df commands.

2. Common Usage Scenarios

We will be using the df and du commands interchangeably based on the information we are seeking, to check the amount of space used and free on our filesystem and partitions the df command is used additionally to check for space usage on a directory level the command du is used.