Understand output of "free" command

Hi Friends,

I am really confused with the output of "free" command on redhat linux.
I can see caching and buffer output on two different areas on the output.
Please let me know whats the difference of these two different outputs.
Here I am pasting the command output of my server.

[root@ww-vl-ora06 ~]# free -m
                total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:         12011       9825       2186          0        243       5829
-/+ buffers/cache:       3752       8259
Swap:        16378        313      16065

Regards,
arumon

Hi, if you add buffers and cache together, you get: 6072. If you subtract 6072 from used you get 3752 used and if you add it to free you get 8259 free.

You may be interested in running this instead:

vmstat -s -S M | grep mem

you can alias that if you like. Something like this works well:

alias meminfo='vmstat -s -S M | grep mem'

Thank you everybody for the replys.

I understood it more clearly.

Regs,
Arumon