partition full (or not)

[Oleg Goldshmidt]

shlomo solomon <shlomo.solomon at gmail.com> writes:

> I´m getting disk full messages on /var. According to df, the / partition 
> (/dev/sda1) is full, but du shows about 90% free space. Kdirstat also shows 
> 90% free. I tried booting from a live CD and the partition is only about 10% 
> full.
>
> Any ideas what´s going on here and how to fix it?

Some possibilities. 

First of all, if df says there is a problem there likely is one. You
should realize that df shows you the disk usage, while du actually
goes through the *files that have names* and shows you their sizes in
allocated blocks.

What is the system doing? If a file is no longer there (some temporary
file, or file deleted by an application that still holds a descriptor
(before fclose() or equivalent), it will show in df but not in du. Are
you downloading anything? Yum? Rsync? Torrent?

Try

$ sudo lsof | egrep "(DEL|deleted)"

- what does it show?

Another possibility: how is "du -s" different from "du --apparent-size
-s"?

Yet another possibility: does du show hidden files or directories? I
don't remember but I suspect it doesn't.

-- 
Oleg Goldshmidt | pub at goldshmidt.org