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Terminal - Commands tagged free - 5 results
free -m | awk '/cache:/ {print $4}'
2012-03-13 19:54:26
User: felixhummel
Functions: awk free
Tags: ram free
0

Does not output the word "shared" so you can easily store this number in a variable.

sync && echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
2011-06-10 07:32:28
User: KeePon
Functions: echo sync
13

run sync first to flush useful things out to disk!!!

To free pagecache:

echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

To free dentries and inodes:

echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

To free pagecache, dentries and inodes:

echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

grep '^MemFree:' /proc/meminfo | awk '{ mem=($2)/(1024) ; printf "%0.0f MB\n", mem }'
2010-06-30 18:33:29
User: dbbolton
Functions: awk grep printf
4

This will show the amount of physical RAM that is left unused by the system.

free -m | awk '/buffer/ {print $4}'
2010-06-27 23:30:27
User: DaveQB
Functions: awk free
Tags: ram free
3

Here we instead show a more real figure for how much free RAM you have when taking into consideration buffers that can be freed if needed.

Unix machines leave data in memory but marked it free to overwrite, so using the first line from the "free" command will mostly give you back a reading showing you are almost out of memory, but in fact you are not, as the system can free up memory as soon as it is needed.

I just noticed the free command is not on my OpenBSD box.

free -m | awk '/Mem/ {print $4}'