disk usage in a partition

[anshulsahdev]

I want to find the amount of free space in the / partition in my machine.
i am using the following two commands for the same .
1. du -h
2. df -h

but i am getting different disk usage figures.

The df -h command states i have only used 4.7G of space :


[root@nnii0232 /]# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3 38G 4.7G 32G 13% /
/dev/sda2 190M 9.9M 171M 6% /boot
tmpfs 1009M 0 1009M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda5 15G 5.9G 7.7G 44% /ora10gas

when i use du -h /

0 /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/power
0 /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1
0 /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio0/id
0 /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio0/power
0 /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio0
0 /sys/devices/platform/i8042/power
0 /sys/devices/platform/i8042
0 /sys/devices/platform/serial8250/power
0 /sys/devices/platform/serial8250
0 /sys/devices/platform/pcspkr/power
0 /sys/devices/platform/pcspkr
0 /sys/devices/platform/power
0 /sys/devices/platform
0 /sys/devices
0 /sys/fs/fscache
0 /sys/fs
0 /sys
11G /


it states i have used 11GB space . Why is this difference between the two commands.

pl help me with this.
Thanks in advance .

Anshul

[Roxoff]

'df' will tell you how much space your partitions are using. 'du' scans the filesystem to tell you how much space is used, so if you have any other partitions mounted under /, it'll include those too.

[anshulsahdev]

thanks ..this helped