Disk Utilities in Linux

Disk Utilities make it easy for system administrators to easily monitor and manage disk partitions in Linux. In this article, we will look at the most popular disk utilities in Linux. Most of them are available in almost every Linux distribution, by default.

Disk Utilities in Linux

Here are the top disk utilities in Linux.

1. fdisk

fdisk (for fixed disk) is a popular disk utility to create and manage disk partitions in Linux. It supports GPT, MBR, Sun, SGI, and BSD partition tables. You can use it to create, resize, modify, delete and move disk partitions. The following command will display all partition tables on your disk.

$ sudo fdisk -l

2. sfdisk

sfdisk (for scriptable fdisk) is another disk utility that is similar to fdisk but offers more features. It also supports GPT, MBR, Sun, SGI, BSD partition tables. Here is the command to display all partition tables on your system.

$ sudo sfdisk -l

3. cfdisk

cfdisk (curses fdisk) is a simple disk partitioning utility that allows you to manage disk partitions on your system. Like fdisk and sfdisk, it allows you to create, modify, resize and delete disk partitions. You can navigate through its output using right & left arrow keys.

$ sudo cfdisk

4. parted

parted is another popular command for managing disk partitions. It is used to create new partitions and re-organize existing partitions. You can also use it to copy data across disk partitions as well as hard disks. Like other tools mentioned above, it also supports GPT and MBR partition table formats.

$ sudo parted -l

5. lsblk

lsblk command (list block) displays all available information about available and mounted block devices, such as name, type, mountpoint.

$ lsblk

6. blkid

blkid (block id) is a utility that displays block device attributes such as deice or partition name, label, and filesystem.

$ blkid

7. hwinfo

If you need to get hardware info about your system, you can use hwinfo command. You can also use — <HARDWARE_TYPE> option to list all hardware of specified type. You can also use –short option to get summarized information.

$ hwinfo --short --block

8. df command

If you want to monitor the disk usage, then df is the most popular command for this purpose. Here is a command to display total disk size, used space, available space and usage percent in human readable formats.

$ sudo df -hT

9. pydf

pydf is an alternative to df command to monitor disk usage. It is a python script that displays disk usage and free disk using system colors. It is a great alternative to df command.

$ pydf

In this article, we have learnt about the different disk utilities that system administrators can use to monitor and manage their disk partitions.

Disk Utilities in Linux