Linux Disk Space

On Sat, 03 Jun 2006, in the Usenet newsgroup alt.os.linux, in article

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More correctly, 'du -sbpath-to-name-of-highest-directory' although some are happy with 'du -sk' or even 'du -sm'

which give the size of the parbreastion or slice that contains the directory. Thus, I find

compton ~$ df -ahhome-ibuprofin Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted ondev-hda7 595M 524M 40M 93% home compton ~$

and that's really not the same as

compton ~$ du -smhome-ibuprofin 72 home-ibuprofin compton ~$

which is substantially different, because there are 6 other user home directories on the same parbreastion. It's a lot worse if your Linux system is mounted entirely on one parbreastion. In that case, you'd always get the same answer no matter what directory you queried

keppler ~$ df -ahhome-ibuprofin Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted ondev-hda1 3954M 1958M 1797M 52% keppler ~$ df -ahvar-spool Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted ondev-hda1 3954M 1958M 1797M 52% keppler ~$ df -ahetc-rc.dFilesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted ondev-hda1 3954M 1958M 1797M 52% keppler ~$

'df' and 'du' measure different things, and do so differently. See the man pages.

Old guy