No matter how high-capacity your storage drive is, you always need to see how much space you have used and what files are using it. While there are ways to do this from the GUI in Linux, as always, you get more detail by using the terminal command line. Terminal tools are especially useful for users who are monitoring remote systems, for example busy system administrators connecting over a secure shell connection. In this tutorial, we’ll look at various ways of using the terminal to check disk usage enabling us to see what storage space is left on our system no matter where we may be.
All the commands in this how-to will work on most Linux machines. We’ve used an Ubuntu LTS install but you could run this how-to on a Raspberry Pi. All of the how-to is performed via the Terminal. You can open a terminal window on most Linux machines by pressing ctrl, alt and t.
