free
Report how much memory is used, available and cached
About
free prints a snapshot of physical and swap memory, split into used, available and cached amounts. It answers whether the device is genuinely short of memory or merely caching files. Run it with a human-readable flag for sizes you can read at a glance.
Install it
Included with Termux
Run this inside Termux. If the package is already present, pkg will say so and
do nothing.
Commands worth knowing
5 of the invocations you will actually reach for. Tap the copy button to put one on your clipboard.
free -h Show memory amounts with human-readable units. No counting digits. free -m Report everything in mebibytes. The numbers stay comparable across runs. free -t Add a totals line combining memory and swap. Useful for a one-line summary. free -s 2 Repeat the report every two seconds. Watch memory rise and fall. free -w Separate the cached and buffer columns. You see how much memory the kernel is holding aside. Worked example
Run free -h and this is what you should see.
$ free -h
total used avail
Mem: 3.6Gi 2.1Gi 1.4Gi
Swap: 1.0Gi 120Mi 904Mi Developed by
procps-ng project · released under GPL-2.0-or-later.