The sys admin's daily grind: Di

Di is All In

Article from Issue 147/2013
Author(s):

The more frequently a command is used, the fewer letters it should have, so the use of two-key commands like ls, mv, and df is second nature. We look at a previously little-known representative of this club, di.

To be fair, I have to admit that many two-letter commands compensate for their compact size with a breathtaking number of parameters. The tool I look at today, Di [1], is no exception. The name stands for "disk information" – it's a kind df on steroids. Like its role model, Di delivers information about filesystems, but with much more detail, and the output filters are much better.

Figure 1 shows the output from di -a, a list of all mounted filesystems, including filesystems that do not exist physically but that the kernel hallucinates into the directory tree. The parameter -x lets you specify filesystems you want Di to hide (e.g., di -a -x proc keeps the /proc entry from being listed). You can also specify multiple filesystems in a comma-separated list:

di -a -x proc,tmpfs,fuse

[...]

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