BASH Memory

HOWTO: Display True Memory Usage
Most people use the free command to show RAM usage, but read it wrong. In the example below, it looks like the computer only has 67 MB available. However, Linux keeps data stored in RAM when reading disks and some more for programs just in case they need it, effectively being greedy for better performance.

What the Linux system is actually using or needs to use is shown on the 3rd line!

free -m total     used     free   shared     buffers     cached Mem:     4049      3982       67        0          16       3530 -/+ buffers/cache:  435     3614 Swap:    6142        53     6088

So, a slightly tweaked command would be...

free -m | awk 'NR==3 {print $4 " MB free."}' 3614 MB free.

(The above command for awk translates to "print 4th column of third line" :-)

Thanks to Thoughts by Clag G.

HOWTO: INSTALL: ps_mem
cd /usr/local/bin wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pix... sudo chmod +x ps_mem.py sudo ln -f /usr/local/bin/ps_mem.py /usr/local/bin/psmem

Usage

sudo psmem sudo psmem | grep -E thunderbird

For more information see the GitHub page, and thanks to Epety ET.