du -s /dev = megabytes? found after at least 10G free space disappeared

[Aaron.Sterr]

On Tue, 20 Apr 2004, Russell Coker wrote:

> On Tue, 20 Apr 2004 17:53, George Garvey <tmwg-fedorat at inxservices.com> wrote:
> >    Suddenly ran out of disk space on a server that had at least 10G free
> > space. On that system, du -s /dev reports 75616. This doesn't account for
> > the lack of free space, but it also doesn't make sense. I wonder what else
> > is going on.
> 
> What does "ls -lS /dev |head" report?
> 
> Typos as root are a good way to waste disk space.  /dev/nul is the most 
> common, and a typo for the name of a tape device is also reasonably common.
> 
> 
If du is not finding the space usage, then it sounds like there is a large
file that has been unlinked, but still has an open file descriptor.

Did you rm any files that might still be referenced by a running process?

-Aaron