Displaying Free and Used Memory with free

Although top includes some memory information, the free utility displays the amount of free and used memory in the system in kilobytes. (The -m switch displays in megabytes.) On one system, the output looks like this:

matthew@seymour:~$ free             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cachedMem:       4055680    3327764     727916          0     280944    2097568-/+ buffers/cache:     949252    3106428Swap:      8787512          0    8787512

This output describes a machine with 4GB of RAM memory and a swap partition of 8GB. Note that none of the swap is being used and that the machine is not heavily loaded. Linux is very good at memory management and ...

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