Disk usage monitor

duf

It seems a little strange to be worrying about disk space in the 21st century. Storage is now cheap, and most of us can afford SSDs or spinning disks with enough storage to save the things we want immediate access to. For everything else, there's Nextcloud or a LAN-based NAS. But like CPU cores and RAM, it seems whatever capacity we have, we use. We still run out of processing power, memory, and storage. And when it's storage, the first command many of us reach for is the humble df (disk free). Type df on almost any machine, even something running macOS, and you're presented with a table showing every mounted storage device, the number of blocks they contain, which blocks are being used and which are available, and the percentage of used capacity. Most of us add the -h flag to turn the large byte-based numbers into something more easily understandable such as megabytes and gigabytes. But other than that, it's a simple command that does what it needs to do with very few flourishes.

Here is where duf can be appealing. It's a command that obviously takes its inspiration from the humble df, but it succeeds in making the same information much more presentable and eye-catching. df's table output is transformed into a multicolor view with multiple panels for each type of device: local, network, and special, which includes local mount points such as dev and tmp. Additional arguments can be used to see more, including pseudo, duplicate, and inaccessible filesystems, and the hide command can be used to see less. The colors in the output are important, because they immediately communicate when a device is running out of space, regardless of its type or size. Green means there's plenty of capacity, amber means a reasonable amount has been used, and red means you're getting close to the limit.

Project Website

https://github.com/muesli/duf

Check your storage capacity in style with the colorful and completely configurable duf.

Disk usage monitor