Re: df spins up hard drives. kindof a bug, mostly a feature request, or request for advice

[Jim Meyering]

Aaron Peterson <address@hidden> wrote:
> If my system has a spun down drive, df actually checks with the drive to see
> how much space it has left on it.

What type of system are you using?
Are you using a recent version of df?
Run df --version.  The latest is from coreutils-5.2.1.
You should be able to run e.g. `df .' without touching
any drive other than the current one.

If you run `df' with no options, it makes df check
all partitions.  You might want to use an alias or function
wrapper to make df check only the ones on active drives.  E.g.,

  df /dev/hda[234]

Be sure you're using a recent version of df, since it
works around a misfeature of glibc that would make older
versions of df try to access every disk listed in /etc/fstab
even when df was getting stats for a single partition.