Disc Free (df) weirdness (FC2)

[Scot L. Harris]

On Fri, 2005-10-07 at 11:43, Peter Arremann wrote:
> 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. 

Another one I have seen in the past, an admin started a backup job and
the system ran out of drive space.  Found that they had miss-typed the
device name of the tape drive.  There was a huge file created under
/dev.  Such things are usually easy to locate using find but you have to
know to look for it.