RE: du and df not in sync?
Hi,
I don't know the answer to this question for sure but in UNIX in general you
can have files with "holes" in them. If you create a file and move the file
position pointer 2 billion steps forward and write one byte your file will
be reported as 2 gig big, but it will in fact be a lot smaller. This is very
common with core files for instance. This "hole" in the file is transparent
to all other system calls so if you copy the file it will in fact end up
being 2 gig big.
This means that du will report it as being 2 gig but df which uses other
information will report the actual amount if disk space used and they might
not add up.
I can't guarantee that it works like this in Linux (as I'm not as proficient
with Linux as I was with the now obsolete Sun OS 4.1. Consider this a theory
rather than a fact.
Regards,
Olof Edlund
-----Original Message-----
From: erik@earthlink.net [mailto:erik@earthlink.net]On Behalf Of Erik Steffl
Sent: Sunday, January 28, 2001 2:35 PM
To: debian-user
Subject: du and df not in sync?
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% /
/dev/hdb6 4.6G 1.3G 3.0G 30% /usr
/dev/hdb7 18G 9.4G 8.1G 54% /home
/dev/hdb2 6.5G 2.2G 3.9G 36% /mnt/old
/dev/hda1 786M 702M 84M 90% /mnt/win
du reports 110M in / filesystem and df reports 649M used - that's
quite a difference. I have just ran apt-get clean (before that df
reported 97% used on /), is it possible that df does not use up to date
info? Is there anything I need to do before df reports current state
(which I think is 110M used)?
I checked the man page and tried--sync as well but that gives the same
result.
TIA
erik
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