FREE(1) User Commands FREE(1)
NAME
free – Display amount of free and used memory in the system
SYNOPSIS
free [options]
DESCRIPTION
free displays the total amount of free and used physical and swap
memory in the system, as well as the buffers and caches used by the
kernel. The information is gathered by parsing /proc/meminfo. The
displayed columns are:
total Total installed memory (MemTotal and SwapTotal in
/proc/meminfo)
used Used memory (calculated as total – free – buffers – cache)
free Unused memory (MemFree and SwapFree in /proc/meminfo)
shared Memory used (mostly) by tmpfs (Shmem in /proc/meminfo,
available on kernels 2.6.32, displayed as zero if not
available)
buffers
Memory used by kernel buffers (Buffers in /proc/meminfo)
cache Memory used by the page cache and slabs (Cached and Slab in
/proc/meminfo)
buff/cache
Sum of buffers and cache
available
Estimation of how much memory is available for starting new
applications, without swapping. Unlike the data provided by
the cache or free fields, this field takes into account page
cache and also that not all reclaimable memory slabs will be
reclaimed due to items being in use (MemAvailable in
/proc/meminfo, available on kernels 3.14, emulated on kernels
2.6.27+, otherwise the same as free)
OPTIONS
-b, –bytes
Display the amount of memory in bytes.
-k, –kilo
Display the amount of memory in kilobytes. This is the
default.
-m, –mega
Display the amount of memory in megabytes.
-g, –giga
Display the amount of memory in gigabytes.
–tera Display the amount of memory in terabytes.
-h, –human
Show all output fields automatically scaled to shortest three
digit unit and display the units of print out. Following
units are used.
B = bytes
K = kilos
M = megas
G = gigas
T = teras
If unit is missing, and you have petabyte of RAM or swap, the
number is in terabytes and columns might not be aligned with
header.
-w, –wide
Switch to the wide mode. The wide mode produces lines longer
than 80 characters. In this mode buffers and cache are
reported in two separate columns.
-c, –count count
Display the result count times. Requires the -s option.
-l, –lohi
Show detailed low and high memory statistics.
-s, –seconds seconds
Continuously display the result delay seconds apart. You may
actually specify any floating point number for delay,
usleep(3) is used for microsecond resolution delay times.
–si Use power of 1000 not 1024.
-t, –total
Display a line showing the column totals.
–help Print help.
-V, –version
Display version information.
FILES
/proc/meminfo
memory information
SEE ALSO
ps(1), slabtop(1), top(1), vmstat(8).
AUTHORS
Written by Brian Edmonds.
REPORTING BUGS
Please send bug reports to ⟨[email protected]⟩
COLOPHON
This page is part of the procps-ng (/proc filesystem utilities)
project. Information about the project can be found at
⟨http://sourceforge.net/projects/procps-ng/⟩. If you have a bug
report for this manual page, see
⟨http://sourceforge.net/p/procps-ng/tickets/⟩. This page was obtained
from the project’s upstream Git repository
(https://gitorious.org/procps) on 2014-12-30. If you discover any
rendering problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe
there is a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
(which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
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procps-ng July 2014 FREE(1)