large directory while it is empty
 

as shown below..

drwxrwxrwx 2 dispatcher dispatcher 20668416 Nov 26 04:13 AlJazeera

it shown that the size of the directory is 20668416

But when I try to list the directory using ls:
give total 0

by using ls -la the result is:
drwxrwxrwx 2 dispatcher dispatcher 20668416 Nov 26 04:13 .
drwxrwxrwx 15 dispatcher dispatcher 8192 Nov 19 2006 ..


is that normal ? if it is not, how can fix the problem?

I am not sure what the proper behaviour is. Probably it depends on the filesystem type / configuration. On my ext3 filesystem, I created a directory and created a bunch of files in it - seeing the size of the directory increase to store the names of the files and so on. Then I deleted the files. The directory size remained the same as it was when it was full of files.

I guess (for ext3 at least) that space is not recovered until you rmdir the directory and create a new one. I'm not sure of the reasons for this. If I had to guess I would say that it's simple more efficient to do that, and it might also help prevent fragmentation. Disk space is cheap, so it's probably a reasonable way to do things in most cases.

I'm going to pretend I didn't see the permissions on your directory listing, else I might start to worry about your system.

for more details:
I found that the /home directory is a shared.

systems A capacity is 98% --> the system which contain the bove problem

but with the other is 38%

and both have same contains of files and directoris.

I have absolutely no idea what you mean by post #3.

the system which i talked about in post#1, has shared /home directory,
it look that the capacity /home is 98%.
but it is 38% with other system shared same /home directory

By "shared", do you mean it is a remote filesystem mounted using samba or NFS?

by more /etc/fstab

find that:
LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
LABEL=/home /home ext3 defaults 1 2LABEL=/opt /opt ext3 defaults 1 2
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
LABEL=/tmp /tmp ext3 defaults 1 2
LABEL=/var /var ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/sda7 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0

In what respect this this shared? Just looks like a normal disk to me.

yes it is,,,
and for more infomation the other mount directories have normal affect.
only /home has not affected

So what did you mean by "but it is 38% with other system shared same /home directory"?

Sorry, but this makes no sense to me at all.

that is the problem, this is not making sense for me also,

let explain by example:
system A & system B have shared directory on /home
system A shown that the capacity of /home 98%
but system B shown that the capacity of /home 38%

/home on system A not affected
/home on system B affected

both have same contains file as a share.....

this is my inquiring..

It just looks that it is not a shared directory at all... Please paste the output of this command from both machines:

[root@COM2 root]# mount | grep /home
/dev/sda2 on /home type ext3 (rw)
db1.thuraya.com:/home/scpusr/ss7files/ on /home/scpusr/ss7files type nfs


[root@DB1 root]# mount | grep /home
/dev/sda2 on /home type ext3 (rw)
[root@DB1 root]# hostname
DB1.thuraya.com


the Problem with COM2 system

Does du -h AlJazeera on com2 show any files? If it says its empty, and you think its empty, how about just removing it and recreating it?
rmdir AlJazeera
mkdir AlJazeera

The fifth column is the size of the directory (file) itself and not the size of the contents. I was able to verify that this number isn't reduced by deleting the contents of a directory. I had a directory with 10s of thousands of scrap files which I deleted. After deleting, the number in the 5th column of the ls -ld */ listing was still 8MB.