[H-GEN] Out of disk space errors?

[Michael Anthon]

David Harrison wrote:

> I recently ran into a problem on one of our Linux boxes - something
> had filled up one of the partitions, and df was reporting 0 bytes
> available. I freed up a stack of disk space, but no matter how much I
> freed up, there was still only zero bytes available - despite the fact
> that the 'used blocks' column was signifcantly less than before and
> continuing to drop the more I deleted.
>
This sounds like some program has a file open and is probably writing to
it but the file has been deleted by another process.  I've had similar
problems on one of our servers recently.  If you open a file in one
process and start writing to it, then delete that file without the first
process closing it's file descriptor then the file will still be there
and still be taking up disk space but you won't see it if you use
something like ls to look for it. 

Someone with a better understanding of file handles and stuff might be
able to explain it a bit better or correct me if I am wrong.

Try the program lsof (LiSt Open Files), it should give you enough
information to track down the problem.

Cheers,
Michael