On Wed, 2008-04-02 at 23:13 +0800, Ed Greshko wrote: > Patrick O'Callaghan wrote: > > On Wed, 2008-04-02 at 12:51 +0800, Ed Greshko wrote: > >> Patrick O'Callaghan wrote: > >> > >>>>> BTW, it might be worth knowing what filesystem the OP is using. In my > >>>>> case it's ext3. > >>>> FWIW, the OP is probably happy to have his problem solved. Chances are he > >>>> is running ext3 as most people take the default. > >>>> > >>>> What would be more interesting would be to know what file system you are > >>>> running. > >>> ext3, as I already said. > >> Mis-read it. Sorry.... > >> > >> I run ext3 and it acts as I've said... The output of du and df differ. > > > > There's clearly some misunderstanding here, on one side or the other, or > > both. Forget it. > > At least I know exactly what is going on and the OP's issue is resolved. Sure.. I know I said "forget it", but at the risk of beating a dead horse, I'd just like to share something a friend pointed out, which explains the OP's original problem. "du -b" acts differently from "du", and "du -k", and "du -m". The latter three all give the real disk usage, which for a sparse file will be low until the file fills up. "du -b" gives the *apparent* file size, which can indeed be larger than the total filesystem size. So it all comes down to RTFM ... poc
