Memory Management with 'Free'

FreeBSD appears to lack the useful utility free. There is always the option of using top, however sometimes it's just a little more than what you may need. There are two ways you can generally go about addressing this issue. A perl script was written by Ralf Engelschall which gives you the equivalent functionality of the 'free' command. The output is a little different from the GNU Free command, however. You can download the script here.

For a more familiar option, you can use the freecolor utility, found it ports.

# cd /usr/ports/sysutils/freecolor
# make install clean
# freecolor -t -m -o
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          4082        825       3256          0          0        117
Swap:         2048          0       2047
Total:        6130 = (     826 (used) +     5421 (free))

This utility will emulate the output of the GNU Free utility (although the syntax is slightly more complex, but you can easily alias this.)

alias free='freecolor -t -m -o'