Hello,

I am (still) using a Fedora release 7 (Moonshine). The filesystem is partitioned with ext3 and the /tmp folder resides in the extended partition.

Recently I had the error "/tmp folder full". The df command was indeed indicating the folder was 100% full, but doing a rm -rf /tmp/* and rm -rf /tmp/.* didn't help so much, it remained full at 96%. The only thing I could do is to reboot the server. It is now behaving normally.

Has anyone experienced the same issue? What is it and how do you fix it without rebooting?

On my side I have experienced the same issue several times with the old HPUX 9000 (I know I kinda deserve it), and only a reboot helps in such a case.

quite possibly it would have been open files. a filename is just a pointer to the space ion disk, once an application has a file open, the filename entry is irrelevant. As such if you unlink the filename from the area of disk space it is associated to, the file is still there and in use, so the disk space can't be declared "free". referring to it as "unlinking" usually makes what you're acually doing clearer compared to "deleting" (unlink and rm are the same command)

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Thanks a lot. Next time before rebooting I will try: