On Fri, 2005-10-07 at 11:43, Peter Arremann wrote: > 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. Another one I have seen in the past, an admin started a backup job and the system ran out of drive space. Found that they had miss-typed the device name of the tape drive. There was a huge file created under /dev. Such things are usually easy to locate using find but you have to know to look for it.
