Linux – the unit of the output of df -k

linuxshell

What is the unit for Used and Available? And what does 1K-blocks mean? Does it mean that the size is in kB?

Command:

df -k | head -2

Output:

Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda7              9920592   1054440   8354084  12% /

Best Answer

From man df:

Display values are in units of the first available SIZE from --block-size, and the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. Otherwise, units default to 1024 bytes (or 512 if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set).

SIZE may be (or may be an integer optionally followed by) one of following: KB 1000, K 1024, MB 1000*1000, M 1024*1024, and so on for G, T, P, E, Z, Y.

The -k switch is equal to --block-size=1K, which means that the numbers are in multiples of 1024 bytes.

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