Someone in the Novell Support Forums was asking for some help on how to determine how much total system RAM was in a computer.

If the amount of RAM was greater than 512 megs, then he wanted to restore an add-on image for an application which required 512 megs of RAM to run properly.

I was able to use the following command to output the total amount of system RAM into the variable RAMTOAL:

RAMTOTAL=`free | awk '/Mem:/ {print $2}'`

You can verify this by typing:

free

On my test system I see the following output:

Click to enlarge.

Note that my total RAM is listed as 516352.

Then type:

echo $RAMTOTAL

The value stored in the variable RAMTOTAL evaluates to 516352.

You could do something similar for "Used RAM" and "Free RAM", though it is probably not as useful:

RAMUSED=`free | awk '/Mem:/ {print $3}'`

RAMFREE=`free | awk '/Mem:/ {print $4}'`