We just installed Slackware 12 on a new Dell server. 500GB primary partition. Within two weeks, it's full. Don't know why. Trying to find the offending file(s) I logged in as root and did:
root@myserver:/# df -h /
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 461G 461G 0 100% /
Then I did a du with max-depth=1, sorting for size, and got:
root@myserver:/# du -h --max-depth=1 / |sort -n -r
du: cannot access `/proc/5404/fd/4': No such file or directory
du: cannot access `/proc/8541/task/8541/fd/4
du: cannot access `/proc/8541/fd/4': No such file or directory
120M /bob
109G /
104G /shares
100M /lib
92M /downloads
17M /boot
13M /sbin
12M /etc
8.0K /home
7.8M /bin
4.5K /media
4.0K /mnt
3.3G /usr
2.6M /dev
2.3M /root
2.1G /var
0 /tmp
0 /sys
0 /srv
0 /proc
0 /opt
0 /htdocs
0 /backup
There's nothing showing there that's taking up 500 GB. What am I missing and how do I find the rest of the 400GB?
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tried it - here are the results:
root@myserver:/# du -ks /
du: cannot access `/proc/9007/task/9007/fd/4
du: cannot access `/proc/9007/fd/4': No such file or directory
114286992 /
root@myserver:/#
Nothing was deleted. The server was running happily for a couple weeks - brand new and now no one can do anything - obviously. I've always used du -hs --max-depth=1 but this time it isn't giving me the info I need.
Wow! That did it. what the heck happened there? any idea what would cause that? Now we have:
root@myserver:/shares# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 461G 109G 353G 24% /
tmpfs 1.8G 0 1.8G 0% /dev/shm
root@myserver:/shares# du -h --max-depth=1 /
7.8M /bin
120M /bob
2.6M /dev
12M /etc
100M /lib
4.0K /mnt
0 /opt
0 /srv
0 /tmp
0 /sys
2.1G /var
3.3G /usr
17M /boot
8.0K /home
du: cannot access `/proc/3352/task/3352/fd/4
du: cannot access `/proc/3352/fd/4': No such file or directory
0 /proc
13M /sbin
2.3M /root
4.5K /media
92M /downloads
0 /backup
0 /htdocs
104G /shares
110G /
root@myserver:/shares#
du and df now look the same.
I just got some info from the guy that actually built the server. He took a look at it this morning and found his error. His explanation was that he had mounted the old server's hard drive over the network on the new server so he could copy over files and configurations. He left it that way. Apparently it was trying to mount the drive but failing and a log file was filling with errors. When I asked why du didn't show that log file in its report he said it was because the file's hidden and du can't show it. I was surprised when he said there is no switch for du that could show that file in the results. I got no further explanation from him. Does that sound right to you at all? Could there be files that df shows but du can't?
Unix / Linux treat files that their names start with dot (.) as hidden files e.g. .profile. I checked on my system and du is not ignoring hidden files.
As I said before, if files are deleted while they are open by running processes then they will not appear in file listing, but the space occupied by them will not be released to the free space till those processes close them or processes are stopped. When you rebooted your system then those processes were stopped which resulted in releasing the space
I had tried both of these to try to find dot (.) files that might be hiding in there:
du -sk .[A-z]* *|sort -n
du -ks * .[a-zA-Z]*
I found those suggestions online. I still didn't get any result that showed a directory that was filled to 400GB. Should those commands have worked?
Just curious. You answered my main question. I'll close it out and award points.
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by: omarfaridPosted on 2008-08-23 at 13:36:31ID: 22298363
if you run
du -ks /
what do you see?
Have you deleted a file that was open by a running process?
open files space will not be released till they are closed