Options for checking free hard-drive space in OS X
To keep your system from running out of space, the easiest thing to do is simply monitor your hard drive; however, Apple keeps this detail relatively hidden from you with the default configuration of OS X. Even so, there are options you can use to keep an eye on the free space available in your system.The first is to use the System Information utility, which can be accessed by choosing "About this Mac" from the Apple menu, and then clicking More Info. In the panel that appears, you can click the Storage section to see a calculation of the free space and types of files on any locally mounted volume.While this offers a user-friendly graphic of your drive's space, keep in mind that the sizes reported are based on the system's Spotlight index. This means that if there is an indexing problem, it may show incorrect sizes in the About this Mac window.The Finder's Status bar will show you an ongoing view of the free disk space.Screenshot by Topher Kessler/CNETYou can always force OS X to reindex the drive to clear such problems, but this can be time-consuming. Therefore, if you need to check your drive's space used, more appropriate tools to use are Disk Utility and the Finder's Information window, both of which will show you the exact amount of storage used on your drive. Apple makes these tools convenient, but they will require you to either launch an application, or invoke the information window specifically using the contextual menu or the Command-i hot key.If you wish to have a more readily available view of the free space on your system, then instead of using tools and information windows that require a few steps to invoke, simply enable the Finder's status bar, which will appear below each Finder window and will display not only the number of files in the current folder, but the amount of free space remaining on the drive. This feature is great for giving you an ongoing glimpse of your drive's status, and can easily be enabled by pressing Command-/ (forward slash), or by choosing the option in the View menu.These commands (outlined in blue) will each show the free disk space, located in their output indicated by the arrows (click for larger view).Screenshot by Topher Kessler/CNETFinally, if you are a Terminal user, you have several commands at your fingertips that can give you disk usage information. The first is the classic "df" command, which will output a small table of details about your drive, including the number of blocks, those used, and those available. You can output this in a more readable format (gigabytes, megabytes, and kilobytes), by using the "-H" flag in the following way:df -HIn addition to "df," you can use Apple's provided "diskutil" command, which is a command-line version of Apple's Disk Utility program. This command offers the ability to look up disk information, which you can do for your boot drive by running the following command:diskutil info /One of the lines of output from this command will be "Volume Free Space:" which will show in bytes how much space is free. To make this easier to read, you can filter the output to only show free space, by piping it through "grep" in the following way:diskutil info / | grep "Free Space"Questions? Comments? Have a fix? Post them below or e-mail us!Be sure to check us out on Twitter and the CNET Mac forums.
