How To: List Mounted Partitions

Today we’ll have a nice and simple article, simply because we can, about how to list mounted partitions in Linux. Like so many of these articles, we’re going to need an open terminal. On the other hand, we’ll just be exploring a couple of tools to help us along the way.

Your disk drives, be they solid state or hard disk drives, will be separated into partitions. It can get confusing until you realize that the outputs from these commands won’t always just represent what I’ll call physical partitions. Sometimes, there are virtual partitions – sometimes with their fun file systems.

You may have everything from mounted temporary partitions to software designed to run in its own mounted partition space. When you run these bellow commands, you’ll learn that there are all sorts of mounted partitions. This is completely normal. It’s also pretty easy to weed out the physical partitions.

Why would you want to do this? Well, I’m having a goofy error when I boot one of my computers and I need to narrow it down to which disk it is that’s giving me the error. Once I take the time to do that, I can move on to troubleshooting the problem and finding a solution for the problem.

The tools we’ll be using are ‘findmnt’ and ‘df’. They’re described as the following:

finding:

findmnt – find a filesystem

df:

df – report file system disk space usage

As you can see from the description, both of those have something to do with getting information about a file system. That makes them good tools for the job.

NOTE: There are multiple ways to list mounted partitions. You have GUI and CLI-based tools available to you. One of the goals surrounding this whole project is not just to make people more familiar with Linux but also to help them get comfortable working within the terminal. You’ll be just fine!

List Mounted Partitions:

As I mentioned above, we’ll be using a terminal for this. I do not mind which terminal you’re using but you can usually open the default terminal by pressing CTRL + ALT + T. That works most of the time.

With your terminal now open, you can try the following command:

The output from that command will list your mounted partitions. It’s a lot of text, but most folks are probably only interested in the start of the line. The output of the findmnt command may look a little something like this:

The next command you’re going to want to try will be the ‘df’ command. We’ll be using a few flags. It’s not very complicated, though it may look like it. The command is a simple ‘df’ command and looks like this:

We use the -a flag for ‘all’. Then we use the -T flag because that means type. Finally, we use the -h flag because that means the output will be “human readable” (or more easily read by us mortals.) The output of which looks something like this:

No matter which of those commands you use, it will make your terminal list mounted partitions. If you need to know which partitions are mounted, these are the tools you can start with. They’re easy enough to work with.

Closure:

Well, it’s a bit late in the evening. I almost forgot that there was an article due tomorrow. This happens when I get a lot of responses (elsewhere) on the wrong day. My brain just doesn’t click. I should probably set an automated notification to let me know which days require articles, but I haven’t failed yet. In fact, you get an interesting article about how you can list mounted partitions.

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

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How To: Check Disk Usage With ‘df’

In today’s article, we’re going to do exactly what the title suggests; we’re going to check disk usage with ‘df’. This means we’ll be checking disk usage in the terminal. Seeing as ‘df’ is included with every distro on the planet (I’m pretty sure) it means this won’t be all that complicated.

I am still a bit under the weather, but the show must go on! I’ve gone this long without missing a publication date, so I might just as well keep the  streak up. 

As the title suggests, we’ll be using ‘df’ to check disk usage. This will already be installed as one of the default tools, so you won’t need to install it. That’ll save some time! If you’re curious, the ‘df’ tool describes itself as:

df – report file system disk space usage

If you want to get a head start, you can check the help page. To do that, you’ll want to run:

If you’re like to check the version, the command is:

So, with that in mind, let’s just jump into the article.

Check Disk Usage With ‘df’:

Obviously, this is yet another article where we’re learning about doing things in the terminal. That means you’ll need an open terminal. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With your terminal now open, you can just run the command by itself:

In some cases, it will throw an error and not be able to read everything. That’s usually easily resolved. Just run the command as a privileged user. So that would look like:

Now, you can use that output to do a bunch of math, or just pay attention to the percentages. Or, if you’re wanting, you can use the -h flag and get the output in human-readable format. That looks like:

The output of which might look a little something like this:

the output of sudo df -h
See? No errors and it is nice and readable! You can’t go wrong with that!

As you can see in the picture, I’m only using less than half of my available disk space. I don’t need to worry about running out of space any time soon, but if it gets low I can always check disk usage with ‘df’. Also, it doesn’t matter what directory you’re in when you run the command. As you can see, it runs just fine while in the Downloads directory.

I also wrote an article about using GUI methods to visualize disk space usage. You might prefer one of those methods, but you can always just use the terminal to check disk space.

Closure:

It seemed like a good idea to do a quick article tonight. I’m watching IMSA’s last race of the season and feeling poorly, so hopefully I get some sleep at a reasonable hour. Still, as I mentioned, the show must go on. The site has had a new article every other day for quite a while. I might as well keep up the schedule.

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

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