Directory Size problem

[Dan Track]

On 11/30/06, Steven W. Orr <steveo at syslang.net> wrote:
> On Thursday, Nov 30th 2006 at 08:51 -0000, quoth Dan Track:
>
> =>Thank you very much for the gem of a tip. That is the issue.
> =>
> =>Many Thanks
> =>Dan
>
> Sorry, but I believe that this is not the issue. The size of a directory
> is in fact determined by the maximum number of files tha the directory
> ever contained. (Something in the back of my mind seems to remember
> somethingf about the number of files in a directory exceeding 188 to cause
> the directory to go from 1 block to 2 blocks. I'm probably wrong about the
> exact number.) Your problem is in the 3Gig region so the size of the
> directory is not an issue. Don't confuse the size of the directory with
> the size of the content of the directory.
>
> Every file has two counters on it in the file system. One counter is the
> number of links on the file. Every file is allowed to have multiple names.
> That's what the ln command is all about. (That's ln without the -s
> option.) If you delete a file then the file doesn't actually get its
> storage reclaimed unless the last name to the file is deleted. That's why
> the systemcall to delete a file is called unlink(2). The other counter
> that exists on a file is the open count. If a file is opened and then
> deleted, the file strorage is not reclaimed until the last open channel is
> closed. If a file is opened by multiple channels then this phenomenum will
> occur.
>
> Just for fun, create a big file for yourself:
>
> dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/foo count=1M
> ln /tmp/foo /tmp/bar
> { read ; sleep 1000; } < /tmp/foo &
> { read ; sleep 1000; } < /tmp/bar &
> rm /tmp/foo
>
> Play with these commands and you'll see all of this stuff come into play.
>

Hi

Thanks for the explanation. I had assumed that the person was right,as
I had no other idea why I would have this problem If I run du or df -h
I get to see where the disk usage being taken up, and du shows that
its /var/spool/mqueue. But if I run ls -lhd /var/spool/mqueue it
reports the directory to be only 300k. Can you suggest any other
possibility?

I've run the sync command aswell, but to no avail.

Thanks in advance
Dan