Find size and free space of the filesystem contain

Question

I'm using Python 2.6 on Linux. What is the fastest way:

• to determine which partition contains a given directory or file?

  For example, suppose that /dev/sda2 is mounted on /home, and /dev/mapper/foo is mounted on /home/foo. From the string "/home/foo/bar/baz" I would like to recover the pair ("/dev/mapper/foo", "home/foo").

• and then, to get usage statistics of the given partition? For example, given /dev/mapper/foo I would like to obtain the size of the partition and the free space available (either in bytes or approximately in megabytes).

Answer 1

For the first point, you can try using os.path.realpath to get a canonical path, check it against /etc/mtab (I'd actually suggest calling getmntent, but I can't find a normal way to access it) to find the longest match. (to be sure, you should probably stat both the file and the presumed mountpoint to verify that they are in fact on the same device)

For the second point, use os.statvfs to get block size and usage information.

(Disclaimer: I have tested none of this, most of what I know came from the coreutils sources)

Answer 2

For the second part of your question, "get usage statistics of the given partition", psutil makes this easy with the disk_usage(path) function. Given a path, disk_usage() returns a named tuple including total, used, and free space expressed in bytes, plus the percentage usage.

Simple example from documentation:

>>> import psutil
>>> psutil.disk_usage('/')
sdiskusage(total=21378641920, used=4809781248, free=15482871808, percent=22.5)

Psutil works with Python versions from 2.6 to 3.6 and on Linux, Windows, and OSX among other platforms.

Answer 3

import os

def get_mount_point(pathname):
    "Get the mount point of the filesystem containing pathname"
    pathname= os.path.normcase(os.path.realpath(pathname))
    parent_device= path_device= os.stat(pathname).st_dev
    while parent_device == path_device:
        mount_point= pathname
        pathname= os.path.dirname(pathname)
        if pathname == mount_point: break
        parent_device= os.stat(pathname).st_dev
    return mount_point

def get_mounted_device(pathname):
    "Get the device mounted at pathname"
    # uses "/proc/mounts"
    pathname= os.path.normcase(pathname) # might be unnecessary here
    try:
        with open("/proc/mounts", "r") as ifp:
            for line in ifp:
                fields= line.rstrip('\n').split()
                # note that line above assumes that
                # no mount points contain whitespace
                if fields[1] == pathname:
                    return fields[0]
    except EnvironmentError:
        pass
    return None # explicit

def get_fs_freespace(pathname):
    "Get the free space of the filesystem containing pathname"
    stat= os.statvfs(pathname)
    # use f_bfree for superuser, or f_bavail if filesystem
    # has reserved space for superuser
    return stat.f_bfree*stat.f_bsize

Some sample pathnames on my computer:

path 'trash':
  mp /home /dev/sda4
  free 6413754368
path 'smov':
  mp /mnt/S /dev/sde
  free 86761562112
path '/usr/local/lib':
  mp / rootfs
  free 2184364032
path '/proc/self/cmdline':
  mp /proc proc
  free 0

PS

if on Python ≥3.3, there's shutil.disk_usage(path) which returns a named tuple of (total, used, free) expressed in bytes.

Answer 4

This doesn't give the name of the partition, but you can get the filesystem statistics directly using the statvfs Unix system call. To call it from Python, use os.statvfs('/home/foo/bar/baz').

The relevant fields in the result, according to POSIX:

unsigned long f_frsize   Fundamental file system block size. 
fsblkcnt_t    f_blocks   Total number of blocks on file system in units of f_frsize. 
fsblkcnt_t    f_bfree    Total number of free blocks. 
fsblkcnt_t    f_bavail   Number of free blocks available to 
                         non-privileged process.

So to make sense of the values, multiply by f_frsize:

import os
statvfs = os.statvfs('/home/foo/bar/baz')

statvfs.f_frsize * statvfs.f_blocks     # Size of filesystem in bytes
statvfs.f_frsize * statvfs.f_bfree      # Actual number of free bytes
statvfs.f_frsize * statvfs.f_bavail     # Number of free bytes that ordinary users
                                      # are allowed to use (excl. reserved space)