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To get a summary of the available and used disk space on your Linux system is to type in the df command in a terminal window. The command df stands for "disk filesystem". With the -h option (df -h) it shows the disk space in "human readable" form, which in this case means, it gives you the units along with the numbers.

The output of the df command is a table with four columns. The first column contains the file system path, which can be a reference to a hard disk or another storage device, or a file system connected through the network. The second column shows the capacity of that file system. The third column shows the available space, and the last column shows the path on which that file system is mounted. The mount point is the place in the directory tree where you can find and access the that file system.

The du command on the other hand shows the disk space used by the files and directories in the current directory. Again the -h option (df -h) makes the output easier to comprehend.

By default, the du command lists all subdirectories to show how much disk space each has occupied. This can be avoided with the -s option (df -h -s). This only shows a summary. Namely the combined disk space used by all subdirectories. If you want to show the disk usage of a directory (folder) other than the current directory, you simply put that directory name as the last argument. For example: du -h -s website, where "website" would be a subdirectory of the current directory.

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