We can easily terminate the process with Ctrl + C keyboard shortcut. It’s especially useful if we want to monitor the RAM usage at a specified interval. The -s flag stands for seconds, so free will print the RAM usage every 5 seconds in this example. One more interesting option is the -s option: $ free -h -s 5

Moreover, there are lots of other options that can be used to print the output in the format we like such as –kilo, –mega, –Giga, and so on. However, we can easily print the output in a human-readable format using the -h or –human flag: $ free -h total used free shared buff/cache availableĪs can be seen in the output above, we have a total of 7.6 GiB of RAM.

We can simply type the free command on our terminal without any flags: $ free total used free shared buff/cache available The free command is one of the widely used commands to quickly check for RAM stats because it’s available on most Linux distributions. It’s used to print the physical and swap memory usage - by default, it prints to standard output. Free is the simplest of all the commands we’ll see.

Linux display memory usage