[Fedora] Re: gorged harddrive

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Mon, 2008-03-31 at 17:17 -0600, Ashley M. Kirchner wrote:
> charles f. zeitler wrote:
> > 883393808812    torrents_isos/data
> >
> > somethings wrong with t*s/data  ....
> >   
>     This is very indicative of an open file handle not having been 
> closed properly, and even after removing the physical file, the drive 
> structure still believes it's there.

That's because it is still there. Linux has no builtin operation for
explicitly removing files, just for unlinking their names. When the last
reference is gone, it obligingly frees the space because there's no
longer any way to access the data. A reference means either an on-disk
structure (a directory entry) or an in-process file handle.

>     In my case, that was a syslog issue where I deleted a file, but its 
> handle remained open.  Restarting syslog took care of it.

You unlinked the name (using 'rm'). The space was reclaimed by the
system when the syslog process terminated.

>     In your case, I would suggest restarting whatever process it is that 
> writes to those files on that drive, and failing that, restart the 
> computer and force a file check on that drive.

This doesn't explain why the 'du' output for torrents_isos/data gives a
result larger than the size of the filesystem. A run of fsck should take
care of it.

poc