How to find free memory available for use by applications?

[Shashank Rachamalla]

Hi

I want to write a script to find free memory available for use by
applications. The following is the output of 'free' command in one of
our lab machines.

            total       used      free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        3804        3706        98          0        107       3488
-/+ buffers/cache:       110      3694
Swap:        996           0       996
Total:      4801        3706      1094


Most of the physical memory has been allocated to Memory cache. Should i
consider this memory while calculating free memory assuming that Kernel
decreases memory given to cache and buffers and increases memory for use
by applications when ever they need more memory.


Is the below calculation valid?

Total Free Memory Available for Applications = free + buffers + cached


Thanks,
Shashank