no space left?

[Norman Gaywood]

On Mon, Oct 25, 2004 at 09:47:05AM +0800, Shu Hung (Koala) wrote:
>     [root at fileserver /]# df
>     Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
>     /dev/hda5 20641788 20423212 0 100% /
 
> Then, I tried to find out what exactly is occupying the space. I use the
> command "du -xs" to see the space used in the filesystem. This is the
> result.
 
>     [root at fileserver /]# du -xs
>     3143225 .
 
> God! You see the "du" shows the / partition only used 3.0G but "df"
> shows ALL 20G have been used! What is going on? What should I do to free
> the spaces?

There may be a process with a file open, using all the space, that has
no name in the filesystem. For example, a process that might be out of
control, writing to /tmp/logfile. The /tmp/logfile grows very large so you
delete it. The process still has this file open and continues to write
to it even though the file has no name. du would not show space used by
this program, df would. To reclaim the space you have to kill the process.

If this is the problem, rebooting will also free the space. But I hate
to recommend rebooting to fix problems.

-- 
Norman Gaywood, Systems Administrator
School of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science
University of New England, Armidale, NSW 2351, Australia

norm at turing.une.edu.au            Phone: +61 (0)2 6773 2412
http://turing.une.edu.au/~norm    Fax:   +61 (0)2 6773 3312

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