Disk Partition and Disk Usage

The commands would check what partitions there are on each disk and other details like the total size, used up space and file system etc.

Commands like fdisk, sfdisk and cfdisk are general partitioning tools that can not only display the partition information, but also modify them.

fdisk

$ sudo fdisk -l

Fdisk is the most commonly used command to check the partitions on a disk. The fdisk command can display the partitions and details like file system type. However it does not report the size of each partitions.

Each device is reported separately with details about size, seconds, id and individual partitions.

sfdisk

$ sudo sfdisk -l -uM

Sfdisk is another utility with a purpose similar to fdisk, but with more features. It can display the size of each partition in MB.

cfdisk

Cfdisk is a linux partition editor with an interactive user interface based on ncurses. It can be used to list out the existing partitions as well as create or modify them.

$ sudo cfdisk /dev/sdb

parted

Parted is yet another command line utility to list out partitions and modify them if needed.
Here is an example that lists out the partition details.

$ sudo parted -l

df

Df is not a partitioning utility, but prints out details about only mounted file systems. The list generated by df even includes file systems that are not real disk partitions.

Here is a simple example

$ df -h

Only the file systems that start with a /dev are actual devices or partitions.
Use grep to filter out real hard disk partitions/file systems.

$ df -h | grep ^/dev
To display only real disk partitions along with partition type, use df like this

$ df -h --output=source,fstype,size,used,avail,pcent,target -x tmpfs -x devtmpfs
Note that df shows only the mounted file systems or partitions and not all.

pydf

Improved version of df, written in python. Prints out all the hard disk partitions in a easy to read manner.

$ pydf
Again, pydf is limited to showing only the mounted file systems.

lsblk

Lists out all the storage blocks, which includes disk partitions and optical drives. Details include the total size of the partition/block and the mount point if any.
Does not report the used/free disk space on the partitions.

blkid

Prints the block device (partitions and storage media) attributes like uuid and file system type. Does not report the space on the partitions.

$ sudo balked

hwinfo

The hwinfo is a general purpose hardware information tool and can be used to print out the disk and partition list.

The output however does not print details about each partition like the above commands.

$ hwinfo --block --short

Inxi

Inxi is a very useful command line program that can display information about various hardware components present on the system. To display information about the disk drives and storage devices use the “-D” option with inxi.

$ inxi -D -xx