df and du giving contradictory results ?

wearetheborg · 02-02-2006, 10:31 PM

On my Mandriva 2006 box, I'm not being able to store files on my /home partition.
df gives
/dev/sda6 22G 22G 6.7M 100% /home

du -h . in /home gives 45 MB

What the hells going on ???

haertig · 02-02-2006, 10:49 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by wearetheborg

du -h . in /home gives 45 MB

Are you running this as root? If not, there may be directories that you can't read and therefore the space that their contents occupy won't be included in the total.

wearetheborg · 02-03-2006, 12:04 AM

Yes, I ran df and du as root

btmiller · 02-03-2006, 12:26 AM

Possibly a program has unlinked a file in /home but still has a copy open for itself, in which case the file doesn't have a named linked on the hard drive, but the space is not yet freed. Killing the offending program would help in that case (can be accomplished via a reboot if no other way possible).

wearetheborg · 02-03-2006, 12:55 AM

/home is 22GB, so it cannot be just one file. It must be some program which is doing this, and will do this agaiin on reboot. Any idea on how to find whos teh culprit?

WilliamsJD · 02-03-2006, 01:27 PM

A couple questions:

Have you tried "df -i"? I've seen lots of situations where there's bunches of space but no inodes available.

What type of file system are you using? e2fs? e3fs?

You may need to run fsck on the file system in single user mode.

-- WilliamsJD

wearetheborg · 02-03-2006, 04:42 PM

I'm not sure about the file system. Most likely its some journalised filesystem
df -i gave me:
Filesystem Inodes IUsed IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/sda6 2.8M 611 2.8M 1% /home

wearetheborg · 02-03-2006, 04:49 PM

Found the culprit - there was a user program that was running for a long time - a runaway process or something. I found it out as "who" did not indicate that user to be logged in, and the program (xfig) does not usually run for long, and it was consuming 20% cpu. After killing that process, I got the 22GB back.