How to find out how much memory your system using "dd" command...

[Stan Hoeppner <stan@hardwarefreak.com>]

Frank McCormick put forth on 10/13/2009 9:48 AM:
> On Wed, 14 Oct 2009 01:41:36 +1100
> Frank Charles Gallacher <franxg@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Greetings,
>>
>> When I was a system administrator, there was a command to find out how
>> much real memory was on your system, logged in as root (making sure you
>> didn't confuse the input and output!):
>>
>> dd if=/dev/mem of=/dev/null bs=1024 conv=noerror
>>
>> It would chug away for a minute or two, then give you a number of
>> records in and out, this number was how many KB or RAM you had;
>> I tried this on debian, now all I get is a string of error messages...
>>
>> Is there a better way???
> 
> 
>   Yup. free as in manual free

greer:/# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        192456     182004      10452          0      18620      67488
-/+ buffers/cache:      95896      96560
Swap:      1951888        428    1951460
greer:/#
greer:/#
greer:/#
greer:/# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           187        175         12          0         18         65
-/+ buffers/cache:         91         96
Swap:         1906          0       1905


--
Stan