Raspberry Pi

System Information Commands – Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi is a Linux based system that operates primarily through the terminal. As a Raspberry Pi user, it’s must for everyone to know about some system commands since it will help users fix the issue associated with the device. The issue can be related to RAM usage, storage, partition, or devices attached to your system.

This article will show you five most useful commands that help users in getting the Raspberry Pi system information on the terminal.

System Information Commands on Raspberry Pi

There are five most widely used commands on Raspberry Pi that provide users with different types of system information. The commands are given below:

Let’s discuss these commands in detail.

1: free Command

The free command is one of the widely used command on Raspberry Pi system that provides users with the information regarding the system’s memory usage. The command outputs the total memory and swap usage used memory and swap usage, free memory, and swap usage and more. These types of information are useful for troubleshooting purposes, as a high amount of used memory could indicate an issue with your system and it can slow down the system.

free

2: cat Commands

Concatenate, commonly referred to as “cat” is a useful utility for getting the information from a specific file. With the help of it, you can find out the information regarding memory, cpu and partition information.

Those users who are interested in finding the memory related information on Raspberry Pi can use the following cat command:

cat /proc/meminfo

If you want to retrieve CPU information related to your Raspberry Pi system, you can use the “cat” command in the following way:

cat /proc/cpuinfo

For those users interested in retrieving partition information on Raspberry Pi system, they can follow the below-given cat command:

cat /proc/partitions

3: df Command

The third command used to gather Raspberry Pi system information is the df command. This command will tell you exactly which files and folders are hosted in memory space, which drives and partitions are being used, and what partitions are available for expansion. To use the df command, simply type it into the command line and it will give you an output of the exact number of files, folders, drives, and partitions your Raspberry Pi system is currently using according to the option you entered.

df -h

4: lsusb Command

If you want to retrieve the information of attached USB devices connected to your Raspberry Pi system, you can get it right onto the terminal with the lsusb commands shown below:

lsusb

The above command outputs the attached peripheral devices with your Raspberry Pi system.

5: fdisk Command

If you want to know the disk information and partitions on your Raspberry Pi system then fdisk command is the one you will mostly use for this purpose. It displays the list of partitions created on your system, which are extremely helpful for the Raspberry Pi users who want to work with system drives.

sudo fdisk -l

Conclusion

Getting system related information is useful for the Raspberry Pi users since it will keep them updated about the system health and performance. The above-mentioned guidelines provide five useful terminal commands that are must to remember for the Raspberry Pi users whenever they want to retrieve information like memory, CPU, partition, disk space and more.

About the author

Hiba Shafqat

I am a Computer Science student and a committed technical writer by choice. It is a great pleasure to share my knowledge with the world in which I have academic expertise.