I am using FC 5. My file system is laid out as follows :

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
2.0G 1.9G 0 100% /
/dev/sda1 494M 20M 449M 5% /boot
tmpfs 506M 0 506M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol03
9.5G 151M 8.9G 2% /home
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol04
8.6G 1.7G 6.5G 21% /usr
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol01
8.6G 339M 7.8G 5% /var
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol02
8.6G 183M 7.9G 3% /var/log

I ran:
find $1 -type f -size +2048 -exec ls -s {} + | /bin/sort -nr

and removed any old install files, etc, but the disk space usage isn't changing at all?

Help!

Remember that only the files in "/" that are not in one of the other mounts (/home, /boot, /usr, /var) will affect the space there.

You can use the "-xdev" flag in find to insure it only searches directories that are part of the "/" (root) mount rather than one of the submounts.

Look for any file named "core". Do "file core" when you find one to verify it is a core dump file - you can safely remove those.

Also look for files ending in .tar - those are typically tar bundles. You can usually at least gzip those to shrink them and may be able to remove them if you know you've already unbundled the contents previously (e.g. when you've installed some software).

Log files are another good source of space savings though most of these are in /var so wouldn't help you.

If a file is "open" when you "delete" it then it really doesn't get "deleted" from the inode - it just removes the name. At that point the only way to complete the deletion is to stop the process that has it "open". The simplest way to do this for all processes is just to reboot.

Thank you very much for the quick reply and suggestions! Using the -xdev option, I was able to find the files causing the problem!

scrapper