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I just checked how much free space I have left on my hard disk using

:~$ free -t
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       4063056    1075744    2987312          0      65064     551704
-/+ buffers/cache:     458976    3604080
Swap:      4124668          0    4124668
Total:     8187724    1075744    7111980

But how is it possible that I have only 7 GB left while my hard disk is 320Gb?

Also, how can I make space easily and safe?

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1 Answer 1

up vote 4 down vote accepted

free talks about RAM -- not hard disk space.

Here, it says that you have 8GB total RAM, about 1GB RAM in use, and 7GB RAM free.

If you want a detailed breakdown of HDD usage, you can use df:

df -h

(df stands for 'disk free' and h for 'human-readable).

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Thanks, this indeed makes much more sense! –  Xavier Hofman Jun 9 '13 at 16:42

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