Free space in a CMD shell

Is there a way to get the amount of free diskspace of a disk or a folder in a CMD without having to install some thirdparty applications?

I have a CMD that copies a big file to a given directory and could of course use the errorlevel return from the copy command, but then I have to wait for the time it takes to copy the file (eg...to that then the disk is full and the copy operation fails).

I would like to know before I start the copy if it is any idea at all. Tried the DU.EXE utility from Sysinternals, but that show occupied space only.

If you run "dir c:\", the last line will give you the free disk space.

Edit: Better solution: "fsutil volume diskfree c:"

A possible solution:

dir|find "bytes free"

a more "advanced solution", for Windows Xp and beyond:

wmic /node:"%COMPUTERNAME%" LogicalDisk Where DriveType="3" Get DeviceID,FreeSpace|find /I "c:"

The Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line (WMIC) tool (Wmic.exe) can gather vast amounts of information about about a Windows Server 2003 as well as Windows XP or Vista. The tool accesses the underlying hardware by using Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). Not for Windows 2000.

---

As noted by Alexander Stohr in the comments:

• WMIC can see policy based restrictions as well. (even if 'dir' will still do the job),

• 'dir' is locale dependent.

Using this command you can find all partitions, size & free space: wmic logicaldisk get size, freespace, caption

You can avoid the commas by using /-C on the DIR command.

FOR /F "usebackq tokens=3" %%s IN (`DIR C:\ /-C /-O /W`) DO (
    SET FREE_SPACE=%%s
)
ECHO FREE_SPACE is %FREE_SPACE%

If you want to compare the available space to the space needed, you could do something like the following. I specified the number with thousands separator, then removed them. It is difficult to grasp the number without commas. The SET /A is nice, but it stops working with large numbers.

SET EXITCODE=0
SET NEEDED=100,000,000
SET NEEDED=%NEEDED:,=%

IF %FREE_SPACE% LSS %NEEDED% (
    ECHO Not enough.
    SET EXITCODE=1
)
EXIT /B %EXITCODE%

UPDATE:

Much has changed since 2014. Here is a better answer. It uses PowerShell which is available on all currently supported Microsoft Windows systems.

The code below would be much clearer and easier to understand if the script were written in PowerShell without using cmd.exe as a wrapper. If you are using PowerShell Core, change powershell to pwsh.

SET "NEEDED=100,000,000"
SET "NEEDED=%NEEDED:,=%"

powershell -NoLogo -NoProfile -Command ^
    $Free = (Get-PSDrive -Name 'C').Free; ^
    if ($Free -lt [int64]%NEEDED%) { exit $true } else { exit $false }
IF ERRORLEVEL 1 (
    ECHO "Not enough disk space available."
) else (
    ECHO "Available disk space is adequate."
)

df.exe

Shows all your disks; total, used and free capacity. You can alter the output by various command-line options.

You can get it from http://www.paulsadowski.com/WSH/cmdprogs.htm, http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ or somewhere else. It's a standard unix-util like du.

df -h will show all your drive's used and available disk space. For example:

M:\>df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
C:/cygwin/bin   932G   78G  855G   9% /usr/bin
C:/cygwin/lib   932G   78G  855G   9% /usr/lib
C:/cygwin       932G   78G  855G   9% /
C:              932G   78G  855G   9% /cygdrive/c
E:              1.9T  1.3T  621G  67% /cygdrive/e
F:              1.9T  201G  1.7T  11% /cygdrive/f
H:              1.5T  524G  938G  36% /cygdrive/h
M:              1.5T  524G  938G  36% /cygdrive/m
P:               98G   67G   31G  69% /cygdrive/p
R:               98G   14G   84G  15% /cygdrive/r

Cygwin is available for free from: https://www.cygwin.com/ It adds many powerful tools to the command prompt. To get just the available space on drive M (as mapped in windows to a shared drive), one could enter in:

M:\>df -h | grep M: | awk '{print $4}'

The following script will give you free bytes on the drive:

@setlocal enableextensions enabledelayedexpansion
@echo off
for /f "tokens=3" %%a in ('dir c:\') do (
    set bytesfree=%%a
)
set bytesfree=%bytesfree:,=%
echo %bytesfree%
endlocal && set bytesfree=%bytesfree%

Note that this depends on the output of your dir command, which needs the last line containing the free space of the format 24 Dir(s) 34,071,691,264 bytes free. Specifically:

• it must be the last line (or you can modify the for loop to detect the line explicitly rather than relying on setting bytesfree for every line).
• the free space must be the third "word" (or you can change the tokens= bit to get a different word).
• thousands separators are the , character (or you can change the substitution from comma to something else).

It doesn't pollute your environment namespace, setting only the bytesfree variable on exit. If your dir output is different (eg, different locale or language settings), you will need to adjust the script.

Using paxdiablo excellent solution I wrote a little bit more sophisticated batch script, which uses drive letter as the incoming argument and checks if drive exists on a tricky (but not beauty) way:

@echo off
setlocal enableextensions enabledelayedexpansion
set chkfile=drivechk.tmp
if "%1" == "" goto :usage
set drive=%1
set drive=%drive:\=%
set drive=%drive::=%
dir %drive%:>nul 2>%chkfile%
for %%? in (%chkfile%) do (
  set chksize=%%~z?
)
if %chksize% neq 0 (
  more %chkfile%
  del %chkfile%
  goto :eof
)
del %chkfile%
for /f "tokens=3" %%a in ('dir %drive%:\') do (
  set bytesfree=%%a
)
set bytesfree=%bytesfree:,=%
echo %bytesfree% byte(s) free on volume %drive%:
endlocal

goto :eof
:usage
  echo.
  echo   usage: freedisk ^<driveletter^> (eg.: freedisk c)

note1: you may type simple letter (eg. x) or may use x: or x:\ format as drive letter in the argument

note2: script will display stderr from %chkfile% only if the size bigger than 0

note3: I saved this script as freedisk.cmd (see usage)

I make a variation to generate this out from script:

volume C: - 49 GB total space / 29512314880 byte(s) free

I use diskpart to get this information.

@echo off
setlocal enableextensions enabledelayedexpansion
set chkfile=drivechk.tmp
if "%1" == "" goto :usage
set drive=%1
set drive=%drive:\=%
set drive=%drive::=%
dir %drive%:>nul 2>%chkfile%
for %%? in (%chkfile%) do (
  set chksize=%%~z?
)
if %chksize% neq 0 (
  more %chkfile%
  del %chkfile%
  goto :eof
)
del %chkfile%
echo list volume | diskpart | find /I " %drive% " >%chkfile%
for /f "tokens=6" %%a in ('type %chkfile%' ) do (
	set dsksz=%%a
)
for /f "tokens=7" %%a in ('type %chkfile%' ) do (
	set dskunit=%%a
)
del %chkfile%
for /f "tokens=3" %%a in ('dir %drive%:\') do (
  set bytesfree=%%a
)
set bytesfree=%bytesfree:,=%
echo volume %drive%: - %dsksz% %dskunit% total space / %bytesfree% byte(s) free
endlocal

goto :eof
:usage
  echo.
  echo   usage: freedisk ^<driveletter^> (eg.: freedisk c)

Is cscript a 3rd party app? I suggest trying Microsoft Scripting, where you can use a programming language (JScript, VBS) to check on things like List Available Disk Space.

The scripting infrastructure is present on all current Windows versions (including 2008).