Disc Free (df) weirdness (FC2)

[Craig White]

On Fri, 2005-10-07 at 12:49 -0500, Mike McCarty wrote:
> 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. 
> 
> Yes, I am aware. But what process would have consumed about 1G, and then
> deleted it, while *another* process had it also opened?
> 
> > 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. 
> 
> I guess I'm not making myself clear, somehow.
----
there was no way to know that - your 'today' du log didn't include /proc
and neither of them included /dev so all anyone can do is speculate so
it's not as if anyone can definitively offer an answer.

Craig


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