fr is a command-line tool to print free resources in delicious flavors. In short, fr is to free as htop is to top.

fr was written due to unhappiness with the bare-bones, hard-to-read free command. I wanted something a bit more… graphical. Instead of this:

total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached

Mem: 4045216 2159764 1885452 0 192404 942944 -/+ buffers/cache: 1024416 3020800 Swap: 0 0 0

You'll see something more like this:

Free Resources in Blocks of 1 Megabyte (1,000,000 bytes)

DEVICE   VOLUME    CAPACITY       USED       FREE                 MOUNT CACHE
⌁ RAM                 4,142      1,421      1,461  ▉▉▉▉▉▉▉░░░░░░▏       1,261
▪ SWAP                    0

▪ sda1   Ubuntu      18,617      7,000     10,671  ▉▉▉▉░░░░░░░░░▏ /
▪ sda5   Data        88,107     85,218      2,889  ▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉░▏ /media/Data
◗ sr0    PREDATOR    45,206     45,206          0  ▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▏ /media/PREDATOR

... in fruity colors if you so choose. Yes, color can be turned off (NO_COLOR environment variable is supported), units chosen, network mounts filtered, etc, etc.

fr 3.x has been tested on Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic "Tch-tch-tch-tch…", Fedora 39, Windows 7, and MacOS 10.13 "High Sierra," so far.

As of fr version 3.x, Dbus and Udisks are no longer required or used on Linux. Rather, data is read from the /proc, /dev, and potentially /sys filesystems.

To install per user (add /home/$USER/.local/bin to PATH):

pip3 install --user fr

To install system-wide as root:

sudo -H pip3 install fr

Support is still experimental. Could use some help as Win7 in a VM is all I have access to these days.

To install per user:

pip3 install --user fr[win]

(You'll need to add the install folder to your PATH, e.g. C:\Users\%USERNAME%\Python36\Scripts.)

To install for everyone, run as Admin:

pip3 install fr[win]    # installs winstats, colorama

Yes, it supports that too. Support is experimental as well:

[sudo] pip3 install [--user] fr

And off you go.

FYI, the Unicode block characters look a bit better with Source Code Pro as the terminal font—YMMV.

Could use some help here also, borrowing a Mac is my only option. Currently runs sysctl, vm_stat, and df under the hood, hoping there are better options?

Both Windows and Mac OS are not currently able to detect whether extended properties of filesystems. The port to Python 3 seems to have broken Windows in that regard, which used to work.

I've given up on Unicode icons (for now) on the Windows console and went back to ASCII. Perhaps it should print out "conventional/high" memory too.

The Linux console (the real boot up console, pre-X) has a very limited character set and therefore uses ASCII as well.

Both Windows and the Linux (non-X11) consoles are limited to sixteen colors. Apparently Windows 10 has been upgraded to support more, but I haven't yet found documentation on how to detect it.

Run it ;)

fr

And of course there are a number of options, spit out when this is typed:

fr -h

GPL, version 3+.

• 3.01 - Fix locale.format on Python 3.12, skip devtmpfs by default on Linux.
• 3.00 - Major rewrite to support Python 3.6, refactor shitty thirteen year-old code, remove deps on Dbus and Udisks. Still needs a lot of work.