On Thursday 06 October 2005 21:29, Mike McCarty wrote: > Peter Arremann wrote: > > On Thursday 06 October 2005 21:10, Mike McCarty wrote: > >>At 93%, it must have been about 7098935 blocks used. How did a > >>reboot free up 1017187 blocks? > > > > When deleting a file that is currently being used by a program, the disk > > blocks are actually not freed up until the last process that has a closed > > the file. Most likely one of the files you deleted was still being used. > > I forgot to mention... I had NO programs running except for an xterm > with a shell in it, su to root. I had closed all window, and opened > only the one. I do use GNOME with X Window to manage the windows, > however. (I suppose it might have been a gnome-terminal.) Just because you don't run them, doesn't mean that you don't have a bunch of programs running. just do a ps -ef and you'll see how much there is - even on an idle system you often have a few dozen processes. Very often people try removing /var/log/messages and are surprised they don't get disk space back until a reboot because they forgot to restart syslogd. Peter.
