units(7) [suse man page]
UNITS(7) Linux Programmer's Manual UNITS(7) NAME
units, kilo, kibi, mega, mebi, giga, gibi - decimal and binary prefixes DESCRIPTION
Decimal prefixes The SI system of units uses prefixes that indicate powers of ten. A kilometer is 1000 meter, and a megawatt is 1000000 watt. Below the standard prefixes. Prefix Name Value y yocto 10^-24 = 0.000000000000000000000001 z zepto 10^-21 = 0.000000000000000000001 a atto 10^-18 = 0.000000000000000001 f femto 10^-15 = 0.000000000000001 p pico 10^-12 = 0.000000000001 n nano 10^-9 = 0.000000001 u micro 10^-6 = 0.000001 m milli 10^-3 = 0.001 c centi 10^-2 = 0.01 d deci 10^-1 = 0.1 da deka 10^ 1 = 10 h hecto 10^ 2 = 100 k kilo 10^ 3 = 1000 M mega 10^ 6 = 1000000 G giga 10^ 9 = 1000000000 T tera 10^12 = 1000000000000 P peta 10^15 = 1000000000000000 E exa 10^18 = 1000000000000000000 Z zetta 10^21 = 1000000000000000000000 Y yotta 10^24 = 1000000000000000000000000 The symbol for micro is the Greek letter mu, often written u in an ASCII context where this Greek letter is not available. See also http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/prefixes.html Binary prefixes The binary prefixes resemble the decimal ones, but have an additional 'i' (and "Ki" starts with a capital 'K'). The names are formed by taking the first syllable of the names of the decimal prefix with roughly the same size, followed by "bi" for "binary". Prefix Name Value Ki kibi 2^10 = 1024 Mi mebi 2^20 = 1048576 Gi gibi 2^30 = 1073741824 Ti tebi 2^40 = 1099511627776 Pi pebi 2^50 = 1125899906842624 Ei exbi 2^60 = 1152921504606846976 See also http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html Discussion Before these binary prefixes were introduced, it was fairly common to use k=1000 and K=1024, just like b=bit, B=byte. Unfortunately, the M is capital already, and cannot be capitalized to indicate binary-ness. At first that didn't matter too much, since memory modules and disks came in sizes that were powers of two, so everyone knew that in such contexts "kilobyte" and "megabyte" meant 1024 and 1048576 bytes, respectively. What originally was a sloppy use of the prefixes "kilo" and "mega" started to become regarded as the "real true meaning" when computers were involved. But then disk technology changed, and disk sizes became arbitrary numbers. After a period of uncertainty all disk manufacturers settled on the standard, namely k=1000, M=1000k, G=1000M. The situation was messy: in the 14k4 modems, k=1000; in the 1.44MB diskettes, M=1024000; etc. In 1998 the IEC approved the standard that defines the binary prefixes given above, enabling people to be precise and unambiguous. Thus, today, MB = 1000000B and MiB = 1048576B. In the free software world programs are slowly being changed to conform. When the Linux kernel boots and says hda: 120064896 sectors (61473 MB) w/2048KiB Cache the MB are megabytes and the KiB are kibibytes. COLOPHON
This page is part of release 3.25 of the Linux man-pages project. A description of the project, and information about reporting bugs, can be found at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/. Linux 2001-12-22 UNITS(7)
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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 ker- nel. 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) buffers Memory used by kernel buffers (Buffers in /proc/meminfo) cache Memory used by the page cache and slabs (Cached and SReclaimable 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, --kibi Display the amount of memory in kibibytes. This is the default. -m, --mebi Display the amount of memory in mebibytes. -g, --gibi Display the amount of memory in gibibytes. --tebi Display the amount of memory in tebibytes. --pebi Display the amount of memory in pebibytes. --kilo Display the amount of memory in kilobytes. Implies --si. --mega Display the amount of memory in megabytes. Implies --si. --giga Display the amount of memory in gigabytes. Implies --si. --tera Display the amount of memory in terabytes. Implies --si. --peta Display the amount of memory in petabytes. Implies --si. -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 = kibibyte M = mebibyte G = gibibyte T = tebibyte P = pebibyte If unit is missing, and you have exbibyte of RAM or swap, the number is in tebibytes 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 delay Continuously display the result delay seconds apart. You may actually specify any floating point number for delay using either . or , for decimal point. usleep(3) is used for microsecond resolution delay times. --si Use kilo, mega, giga etc (power of 1000) instead of kibi, mebi, gibi (power of 1024). -t, --total Display a line showing the column totals. --help Print help. -V, --version Display version information. FILES
/proc/meminfo memory information BUGS
The value for the shared column is not available from kernels before 2.6.32 and is displayed as zero. Please send bug reports to <procps@freelists.org> SEE ALSO
ps(1), slabtop(1), top(1), vmstat(8). procps-ng 2016-06-03 FREE(1)