Depending on your filesystem type, and configuration, you may have used up all of your inodes. This can occur when you have an exceedingly large number of very small or empty files. The results of 'df -i' will provide you with inode information. /var, /var/log and /tmp are common places to find large numbers of small/empty files.
Further if the files you deleted are being held open by some running process, the space consumed by those open files will not be returned to the filesystem as available until they are closed. Even if the files are no longer visible. -jasons Adam Thornton wrote: > On Wed, Sep 25, 2002 at 11:07:32AM -0400, Geyer, Thomas L. wrote: > >>I am running a Linux instance , SLES 7 with the 2.4.17 kernel. I was in the >>process of building gcc-3.2 when my filesystem became full. I issued the DF >>command and the results showed that "/" was at 100%. So I proceeded to >>delete the directory that I was building gcc-3.2 in and ran the DF command >>again. There was no change "/" was still at 100%. I proceeded to delete >>additional directories and files and still no change, DF still reported that >>"/" was still at 100%. >> >>Has anyone else experienced this? What am I missing? > > > Were you building it as root? > > df tells you what percentage of the disk you're using. However, > 5% of capacity (by default) is reserved for root. So if you're root, > you can use it up until you actually hit the limit of the disk space. > df will continue to report used blocks as greater than the total number > of blocks. > > You may also want to look in /tmp or /var/tmp. Perhaps it's the > temporary files that are killing you, not the actual GCC build files. > You could try building with the -pipe option to the compiler, which is > extremely memory-intensive but does not use temp files. > > Adam >
