Re: Disk unaccountably filled

From: roland (raw_at_ushiva.apk.net)
Date: 07/04/03 

Date: Fri, 04 Jul 2003 09:03:28 -0400

Juha Laiho wrote:
> neil@cfconline.co.uk (Neil Moore) said:
>
>>I am working though the Linux From Scratch (4.1) tutorial without any
>>problems until after I had changed the root to the new partition (at
>>Part III) and mounted "proc" filesystem.
>>
>>At this point the disk seems to have completely filled with files that
>>I can't account for. The disk is 1 Gb approx. formatted as Ext2.
>
>
> Two possibilities. Either nautilus doesn't detect everything there,
> or then there's some process holding unlinked files open.
>
>
>>/dev/hda5 1494204 1494204 0 100% /mnt/lfs
>
>
> Do "du -sk /mnt/lfs". If even this comes up with a figure that is wildly
> different from what you see with "df", then it's the latter guess,
> a process keeping open handles to unlinked files.
>
> As for "du", someone else already wrote how to get sorted, categorised
> output from du, to narrow down the location of the space-consuming
> files, so I won't repeat that.
>
> Then to the latter. On Unix systems, if you "remove" a file that is still
> open somewhere (a binary or library for a process being executed; a conf
> file being kept open by a process; a text file open in an editor; ...),
> then the file will not be truly removed. It won't be accessible through
> the directory entry from that time on, but will still occupy all the disk
> space it did - so it's not yet really removed. The space will be freed
> only when the last process keeping that file open closes the file (either
> by exiting or just by calling close() on the file descriptor).

This may be a dumb sugestion but this has happened to me when a device
file (e.g /dev/fd0) was writen to and /dev/fd0 was really a regular
file.in that case whatever gets copied to it just makes /dev/fd0 huge .
Just a thought (8^).

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