Quick-and-dirty disk free space checker for Windows

By Vasudev Ram

'I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself "Dijkstra would not have liked this", well, that would be enough immortality for me.'

Dijkstra quote attribution

Hi readers,

[ This is the follow-up post that I said I would do after this previous post: Quick-and-clean disk usage utility in Python. This follow-up post describes the quick-and-dirty version of the disk space utility, which is the one I wrote first, before the quick-and-clean version linked above. Note that the two utilities do not give the exact same output - the clean one gives more information. Compare the outputs to see the difference. ]

I had a need to periodically check the free space on my disks in Windows. So I thought of semi-automating the process and came up with this quick-and-dirty utility for it. It used the DOS DIR command, a grep utility for Windows, and a simple Python script, all together in a pipeline, with the Python script processing the results provided by the previous two.

I will first show the Python script and then show its usage in a command pipeline together with the DIR command and a grep command. Then will briefly discuss other possible ways of doing this same task.

Here is the Python script, disk_free_space.py:

from __future__ import print_function
import sys

# Author: Vasudev Ram
# Copyright 2018 Vasudev Ram
# Web site: https://vasudevram.github.io
# Blog: https://jugad2.blogspot.com
# Product store: https://gumroad.com/vasudevram
# Software mentoring: https://www.codementor.io/vasudevram

#for line in sys.stdin:

# The first readline (below) is to read and throw away the line with 
# just "STDIN" in it. We do this because the grep tool that is used 
# before this program in the pipeline (see dfs.bat below), adds a line 
# with "STDIN" before the real grep output.
# Another alternative is to use another grep which does not do that; 
# in that case, delete the first readline statement.
line = sys.stdin.readline()

# The second readline (below) gets the line we want, with the free space in bytes.
line = sys.stdin.readline()

if line.endswith("bytes free\n"):
    words = line.split()
    bytes_free_with_commas = words[2]
    try:
        free_space_mb = int(bytes_free_with_commas.replace(
            ",", "")) / 1024.0 / 1024.0
        free_space_gb = free_space_mb / 1024.0 
        print("{:.1f} MiB = {:.2f} GiB".format(
            free_space_mb, free_space_gb))
    except ValueError as ve:
        sys.stdout.write("{}: Caught ValueError: {}\n".format(
            sys.argv[0], str(ve)))
    #break

An alternative method is to remove the first readline call above, and un-comment the for loop line at the top, and the break statement at the bottom. In that approach, the program will loop over all the lines of stdin, but skip processing all of them except for the single line we want, the one that has the pattern "bytes free". This is actually an extra level of checking that mostly will not be needed, since the grep preceding this program in the pipeline, should filter out all lines except for the one we want.

For why I used MiB and GiB units instead of MB and GB, refer to this article Wikipedia article: Mebibyte

Once we have the above program, we call it from the pipeline, which I have wrapped in this batch file, dfs.bat, for convenience, to get the end result we want:

@echo off
echo Disk free space on %1
dir %1 | grep "bytes free" | python c:\util\disk_free_space.py

Here is a run of dfs.bat to get disk free space information for drive D:\ :

$ dfs d:\
Disk free space on d:\
40103.0 MiB = 39.16 GiB

You can run dfs for both C: and D: in one single command like this:

$ dfs c:\ & dfs d:\

(It uses the Windows CMD operator & which means run the command to the left of the ampersand, then run the command to the right.)

Another way of doing the same task as this utility, is to use the Python psutil library. That way is shown in the quick-and-clean utility post linked near the top of this post. That way would be cross-platform, at least between Windows and Linux, as shown in that post. The only small drawback is that you have to install psutil for it to work, whereas this utility does not need it. This one does need a grep, of course.

Yet another way could be to use lower-level Windows file system APIs directly, to get the needed information. In fact, that is probably how psutil does it. I have not looked into that approach yet, but it might be interesting to do so. Might have to use techniques of calling C or C++ code from Python, like ctypes, SWIG or cffi for that, since those Windows APIs are probably written in C or C++. Check out this post for a very simple example on those lines:

Calling C from Python with ctypes

Enjoy.

- Vasudev Ram - Online Python training and consulting

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