hi

i recently deleted a 1.6G log file because some stupid kid tried to ping flood my box that made my disk full..

then i searched and deleted the file

then i "dh -h" the disk is still 100% full
but when i "du -hs at /" it shows 1.6G used my hd is 4G big

any help is appreciated

Hi,

if you delete a file that some process still has open (in your case probably the process that writes the log file) your file system won't free the claimed disk space until this process dies (although the file isn't visible to other processes anymore - including 'ls' and 'du').

The different observations of the behaviour of the df and du commands results from the fact that df really displays the free disk space while du sums up all claimed space of all directory enties it can stat (b.t.w. this is why du takes longer to complete).

You have to end the process that is writing the log file. If you want to securely truncate a file and immediately reclaim all the disk space, use the following shell (bash) construct

After that, the file's size is zero bytes.

so long...
bruce

hi mr ford,

thank you for your reply and you were correct! although i paniced about the ping floods and i restarted my box. that freed up the disk space once i rebooted. now im focusing on iptables how to prevet those floods.

thanks again!