FREE(1)

NAME
free - show memory statistics

SYNOPSIS
free [-avVtshmkb?] [-s delay]
free [--version, --help, --verbose, --all, --physical, --virtual, --old-kernel, --totals, --human-readable, --megabytes, --kilobytes, --bytes] [--display-interval delay]

DESCRIPTION
Free shows how much memory is currently available and being used by the system, and, optionally, how it's broken down. There are a bunch of options that can change how free presents its output:

-a, --all
Show the memory broken down by physical (Mem:) and virtual
    (Swap:) allocations.

--physical
Show the physical memory.

--virtual.
Show swapspace.

-v, --verbose
Show how much of the used memory is shared between process, and how much of
    the available memory is used for buffers and cached information.

--old-kernel
Sometime between Linux 1.0 and 2.0, the format of the file
    /proc/meminfo changed from a SMTP-like format to a single-column format. --old-kernel forces the kernel to attempt to read the old format, instead of automatically detecting the format being used.

-?, --help
Give a help message, then exit.

-V, --version
Show the version of this copy of
    B free, then exit.

-t, --totals
Show physical, virtual, and total memory. (this is like doing
    free --all, followed by free.)

-s, --display-interval delay
Continuously display the memory information, printing a new report
    every delay seconds.

-m, --megabytes
Show the memory information in megabytes.

-k, --kilobytes
Show the memory information in kilobytes (this is the default.)

-b, --bytes
Show the memory information in bytes.

-h, --human-readable
Show the memory information in a friendly fashion;  memory sizes less
    than 1024 will be shown in bytes, memory sizes less than a megabyte will be shown in kilobytes, and larger memory sizes will be shown in megabytes.

FILES
/proc/meminfo -- the proc filesystem's memory information file.

SEE ALSO
ps(1), top(1)

AUTHOR
David Parsons ( orc@pell.chi.il.us )

BUGS
Unlike the free that's distributed with the procps suite of tools, this program considers buffered and cached data to be available memory. This may confuse people who use both free and one of the top programs to display process information.