Re: close file descriptor on other process

From: James Cooley (jcooley_at_fit.edu)
Date: 03/17/05

  • Next message: Tony van Till: "RE: How to manually start gnome?" 
    Date: Wed, 16 Mar 2005 23:06:38 -0500 (EST)
To: "General Red Hat Linux discussion list" <redhat-list@redhat.com>

    A lot of processes respond to a hangup signal, and release and regrab file
    descriptors without shutting down. You just do a kill -HUP pid and it
    should do the trick. Athough I highly doubt the -HUP signal would cause
    any problem, you may want to wait until a time where it wouldn't cause as
    many problems if it did cause a problem with the process.

    You might be able to find info in the applications documentation about
    whether or not it responds to a hangup.

    Doing a kill -HUP on a process is how many systems handle rotating logfiles:

    move logfile
    create new logfile
    kill -HUP the process so it releases the handle on the old file and grabs
    the new file

    --James Cooley

    > Hi All,
    >
    > I have a process which has opened about ten files but
    > only one of them is currently in use. Each of these
    > ten files is quite large (about 100MB per each file)
    > and the partition is getting full now (80% full).
    > Therefore, I use gzip to compress the other nine files
    > to save some space. However, I found that the disk
    > usage is not decreased but increased to 85% after
    > gzip!
    >
    > When I use lsof to check the files opened by that
    > process, it shows some files are marked deleted as
    > below
    >
    > tecs 17138 tecs 9w REG 104,3 113490637
    > 98458 /logs/output.log.20050308 (deleted)
    >
    > The system is still holding the file descriptors and
    > not released. What should I do to free the space? I
    > cannot stop the process because it is on production
    > now.
    >
    > If I use cp /proc/17138/fd/9 to
    > /logs/output.log.20050308, it will
    > recover the original file, but lsof still shows
    > deleted. Therefore, I cannot use cat /dev/null >
    > /logs/output.log.20040308 to truncate the file.
    > Is there any method which can recover the original
    > file such that I can truncate it and save the disk
    > space?
    >
    > Or, how do I close the file descriptor on other
    > process without stopping the process (assumed that I
    > have root priviledge)?
    >
    > Thanks in advance.
    >
    > Anson
    >
    > __________________________________________________
    > Do You Yahoo!?
    > Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
    > http://mail.yahoo.com
    >
    > --
    > redhat-list mailing list
    > unsubscribe mailto:redhat-list-request@redhat.com?subject=unsubscribe
    > https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
    > 

    -- 
redhat-list mailing list
unsubscribe mailto:redhat-list-request@redhat.com?subject=unsubscribe
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
  • Next message: Tony van Till: "RE: How to manually start gnome?"

    Relevant Pages