Disc Free (df) weirdness (FC2)

[Peter Arremann]

On Thursday 06 October 2005 21:29, Mike McCarty wrote:
> Peter Arremann wrote:
> > On Thursday 06 October 2005 21:10, Mike McCarty wrote:
> >>At 93%, it must have been about 7098935 blocks used. How did a
> >>reboot free up 1017187 blocks?
> >
> > When deleting a file that is currently being used by a program, the disk
> > blocks are actually not freed up until the last process that has a closed
> > the file. Most likely one of the files you deleted was still being used.
>
> I forgot to mention... I had NO programs running except for an xterm
> with a shell in it, su to root. I had closed all window, and opened
> only the one. I do use GNOME with X Window to manage the windows,
> however. (I suppose it might have been a gnome-terminal.)
Just because you don't run them, doesn't mean that you don't have a bunch of 
programs running. just do a ps -ef and you'll see how much there is - even on 
an idle system you often have a few dozen processes. 
Very often people try removing /var/log/messages and are surprised they don't 
get disk space back until a reboot because they forgot to restart syslogd. 

Peter.