How can I find out the total physical memory (RAM) of my linux box suitable to be parsed by a shell script?

Question

I\'m typing a shell script to find out the total physical memory in some RHEL linux boxes.

First of all I want to stress that I\'m interested in the total ph

Answer 1

One more useful command:
vmstat -s | grep memory
sample output on my machine is:

  2050060 K total memory
  1092992 K used memory
   743072 K active memory
   177084 K inactive memory
   957068 K free memory
   385388 K buffer memory

another useful command to get memory information is:
free
sample output is:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       2050060    1093324     956736        108     385392     386812
-/+ buffers/cache:     321120    1728940
Swap:      2095100       2732    2092368

One observation here is that, the command free gives information about swap space also.
The following link may be useful for you:
http://www.linuxnix.com/find-ram-details-in-linuxunix/