Stephen
Thanks for replying.
If the issue related to permissions, wouldn't the error be "Permission
denied"? I get the same error using sudo.
Interesting you get it too.
The problem in my system was indeed elsewhere (mds gone mad again) - but
meanwhile this issue that I've now stumbled over makes it impossible for me to
run du over my disk, which is a bugger....
Cheers,
Ben
On 16/09/2010 16:42, Stephen Watson wrote:
I wouldn't start deleting anything yet!
My UNIX knowledge on character and block devices ('c' or 'b' at the start of an
ls listing shows this) is a bit rusty these days, but a quick look on my iMac
reveals what I'd thought that 0, 1 and 2 are the same file (or inode to be
precise) as are 3, 4 and 5. The -i option to ls will verify this for you.
An ls for me on those directories also produces the same error which is no
surprise as they have only read permissions (as do mine) and you need 'x' to
allow searching of directories.
I imagine that all here is in order and your problem lies elsewhere, but your
best bet would be to look in the system/console logs using the console
application to see if something is looping and writing out error messages
repeatedly to disk. That's how we used to fill up our customers' hard disks
when I was at work :-)
Regards,
Stephen
On 15 Sep 2010, at 11:02, Ben Rubinstein wrote:
Attempting to track down a sudden space gobbler (I start the day with 50GB, and by the
afternoon get warnings of disk full; restart and all the space is reclaimed) I ran
"sudo du -sh" from the root immediately after restart, so that I can run it
again later and get a clue to where the data is going.
But du fails with this message:
du: Can't follow symlink cycle from ./dev/fd/3 to ./dev/fd/3
Investigating /dev/fd I find it looks like this:
$ ls -la
total 0
crw--w---- 1 benr tty 16, 0 15 Sep 08:32 0
crw--w---- 1 benr tty 16, 0 15 Sep 08:32 1
crw--w---- 1 benr tty 16, 0 15 Sep 08:32 2
dr--r--r-- 1 root wheel 0 15 Sep 08:22 3
dr--r--r-- 1 root wheel 0 15 Sep 08:22 4
dr--r--r-- 1 root wheel 0 15 Sep 08:22 5
$ ls -la 3
ls: 3: Bad file descriptor
$ ls -la 4
ls: 4: Bad file descriptor
$ ls -la 5
ls: 5: Bad file descriptor
Is this a very bad thing, or just mildly messy? As /dev/fd/3 (and 4 and 5) are
evidently not doing anything useful can I just delete them so that they don't
get in the way of du, or is this a symptom of something more serious that I
need to investigate first?
(NB: I've run a full Disk Utility verify&repair - and there was stuff, beyond
permissions, to repair - but it made no difference to /dev/fd.)
TIA,
Ben
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