On Thu, 25 Dec 2008 11:42:56 pm Daniel Pittman wrote: > elliott-brennan <[email protected]> writes: > > I got home (from a very good day) and found my machine with a message > > on the screen (in front of Thunderbird) saying that I had less that 4% > > of my /home space left and did I want to start Konqueror to resolve > > this. > > > > Of course, I said yes. Then the whole GUI froze and I ended up > > rebooting and logging-in in safe mode. On checking the disk space: > > > > df -h > > > > I found I had used 79% of my /home space (500G SATA drive with 412G on > > /home). > > [...] > > > Can someone please provide me a bit of an idea as to what this may > > have been about? > > Well, I can't explain why you got the warning, or if it is a genuine > warning or a bug, but I can perhaps shed some light on a corner of Unix > that might explain things: > > Under Unix, if a process opens a file, then deletes it, without closing > the file, it remains in existence until the process exits. It can, for > example, continue to write to the file. > > One of the traditional ways to run out of space on a Unix machine, and > to confuse the heck out of a new sysadmin, is based on this: > > You start a process that, for some reason, spews a huge amount of junk > out, such as bogus warnings or over-verbose logging, and send that to a > file. > > Then, the new admin notices the huge file after a while and deletes it, > but the process doesn't close the file — it continues to write it in the > background. > > Give it a little time and the admin starts to wonder why there is only a > few percent of disk space free, but nothing shows up using it with du(1) > and friends... > > Worse, a reboot cures this — because as soon as the daemon stops running > the file system will free the file, returning the disk space to the free > pool... > > Regards, > Daniel
Hi Daniel, Not my problem, but interesting! Is there then such a utility that shows actual disk usage and one which shows effective disk usage, ass mentioned by your email above. cheers Jon -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
