free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 2013 1996 17 0 27 1381
-/+ buffers/cache: 588 1425
Swap: 956 0 956

This is useful but annoying as it doesn’t show you how much memory is actually free. Files that are used are kept in the ram (referred to as caching). If the memory is needed it is simply overwritten, however if the file is used again it is already in the memory which saves time.

I wrote a quick little bash line to get the actually memory in use or the actual memory free. I use grep to select the right line from the output of free, and then use awk to do the string manipulation and math.

Memory in use

free -m | grep Mem | awk ‘{x=$3-$7; print x}’

Memory free

free -m | grep Mem | awk ‘{x=$2-($3-$7); print x}’