Re: du and df not in sync?
In article <[🔎] 3A748280.54452746@bigfoot.com>,
Erik Steffl <steffl@bigfoot.com> wrote:
> the du and df report quite a different amounts of data on my root
>partition:
>jojda:/home/erik# du -s -h -x /
>110M /
>jojda:/home/erik# df -h
>Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
>/dev/hda4 1.0G 649M 331M 67% /
That in most cases means some process has a (log)file open which
has been deleted. Because it's still open, it still takes space,
but there's no directory entry for it anymore. So du -s -h -x /
won't find it and can't include its size in the total.
"df" however simply asks the filesystem for used/free info, and
that does include the space used by those "phantom" files.
If you kill the process that has that (log)file open, the space
it used will be released. Ofcourse a reboot will do the same thing.
You can find a list of those files and the processes keeping
then open by doing (as root):
ls -l /proc/*/fd | fgrep '(deleted)'
If you see the same after a reboot, your filesystem is probably
a bit broken. The easiest way to force a file system check is
then to do "sync; sleep 3; sync; sleep 1; reboot -f". Yes it's
what we dutch people call "the blunt axe approach" but it works ;)
Mike.
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