How do I show the free memory on a Linux system?
You can show free memory on a Linux system with the free command, like this:
free
That command returns results like this:
total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 8145044 8097552 47492 0 74252 1189464 -/+ buffers/cache: 6833836 1311208 Swap: 12578884 6205424 6373460
If you prefer to see information in MB you can use the -m parameter, like this:
free -m
to get results like this:
total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 7954 7931 23 0 73 1172 -/+ buffers/cache: 6685 1269 Swap: 12284 6059 6224
Finally, here's the full usage information for the free command:
usage: free [-b|-k|-m|-g] [-l] [-o] [-t] [-s delay] [-c count] [-V] -b,-k,-m,-g show output in bytes, KB, MB, or GB -l show detailed low and high memory statistics -o use old format (no -/+buffers/cache line) -t display total for RAM + swap -s update every [delay] seconds -c update [count] times -V display version information and exit
The top utility
If you'd like to see a real-time view of the memory use of applications running on your system you can use the top utility by just typing top at the command line:
top
This starts up an interactive utility you can work with. Keeping with the "memory" theme of this blog post, type a capital letter "M", and top will sort the output by memory used by each running process. After you've seen everything you need, just type "q" to quit the top utility.
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