Determining what is using disk space

qwerty0492 · 01-02-2011, 01:12 PM

We have a CentOS server which is mysteriously reporting disk space filling up in the middle of the night. There's nothing in the crontab so it isn't that.... is there any command we can run to determine what process is filling up the space at that time?

Edit: Maybe some command that shows disk usage (df?) but has a flag that allows me to see what process is currently filling up the disk?

paulsm4 · 01-02-2011, 01:20 PM

Hi -

If you knew *which* file and directory was filling up, that might be your best clue as to "who" and "why".

Short of that, you can run "lsof".

SUGGESTION: take "lsof" snapshots and "df -k" every 15 minutes or so - that might help you find the culprit...

ComputerErik · 01-02-2011, 02:44 PM

How much free space is there normally? It could just be some process running overnight which just uses some temp space to complete a job is causing this if you are hovering right at capacity.

anomie · 01-04-2011, 01:04 AM

Possibly useful lsof(8) output:

Code:

# lsof -s | gawk '{ print $7, $1 "/" $2, "("$3")"; }' | sort -nr | head -50

Run as a cronjob every 10 minutes, and redirected to a date/time-stamped output file should do the trick.