Directory Size problem

[David G. Miller]

"Dan Track" <dan.track at gmail.com> wrote:

> I've got a directory /var/spool/mqueue that is at 3.6G. The problem is
> that I've deleted everything in the directory but the size reported
> from du -hs is still reported as 3.6G. I've shutdown all potential
> sevices that could possibly be using teh directory e.g sendmail,
> httpd, syslog but it hasn't helped if I run an lsof or fuser against
> the directory I get no connections listed.
>
> Could someone please help me figure this weird problem out.
Is it the directory itself that still shows 3.6G?  That is, what does ls 
-lh /var/spool show for the mqueue directory?  Since you've already 
disabled all of the services that may access the directory, why not nuke 
it (rm -rf /var/spool/mqueue) and then re-create it?  Just make sure you 
get the ownership and permissions right.

If the directory contained a large number of small files, it's possible 
that it's just taking the file system some time to "catch up."  At a 
previous job I had to wipe clean a very bushy directory structure with 
several hundred thousand files between test runs.  If we could, we would 
put this directory structure on a separate file system since it was 
faster to unmount it, format it and remount it than it was to rm -rf the 
directory structure.  Could something like this be going on?

Cheers,
Dave

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