Howdy Ya'll,
I have been using Linux for a number of years and frankly this one has me stumped, but while I have some ideas on how I can fix by taking down the server, I can't take the server off line because it is a production server.
There was a tar archive that failed and didn't know it. Until my /var ran out of disk space that is. Within /var there is a file name -M with a file size of 231M. At first I didn't realize it was a failed tar until I tried test extract it and discovered that it was a failed archive.
I have tried to rm, shred, mv, the file but all fail because the file keeps being seen as a command option.
Code:
ls -lh | more
total 231M
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 231M 2009-03-25 13:54 -M
Code:
# rm -f -M
rm: invalid option -- M
Try `rm --help' for more information.
Code:
# shred -uvfz -M
shred: invalid option -- M
Try `shred --help' for more information.
Code:
# mv -M M
mv: invalid option -- M
Try `mv --help' for more information.
Code:
tar -tvf -M
-rw-r--r-- root/root 2147483647 2009-03-25 13:47:39 eng/backup.tar
tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
Code:
# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 1.1G 220M 808M 22% /
tmpfs 3.9G 8.0K 3.9G 1% /dev/shm
/dev/sda9 157M 47M 110M 30% /dsm
/dev/sda6 3.1G 517M 2.5G 17% /opt
/dev/sda10 111G 85G 26G 77% /tmp
/dev/sda7 4.1G 3.1G 931M 78% /usr
/dev/sda8 2.1G 1.9G 193M 91% /var
Now the issue also it likely to be due to the fact that eng/ no longer exists nor does the backup file in question. So I have a 231M file eating up valuable disk space and I can't remove it. My /var/ was at 97% but after deleting some logs that were WAY told old to be worth keeping... (I just realized to that my logs aren't rotating. :-( I will have to look into this) I deleted some achieved logs to free space.
No remember I can't take the server off line (It's Live Production), and I don't have any spare disk to move /var to larger pastures so any help or ideas to rid me of the blasted file would be most helpful. I just need it to not be interpreted as an option.