[H-GEN] Out of disk space errors?

[Jason Parker-Burlingham]

On Sun, May 15, 2005 at 11:59:02AM +1000, 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.

Everyone is mentioning lsof, but no-one is following that up with the
correct invocation to have it do what you want, and the manpage can be a
bit daunting.  The command you want to run is "lsof +L1" (originally
pointed out to me on this list by Anthony Towns after I came up with a
much more roundabout way of doing the same thing).

You should also check that some file is not growing rapidly and
consuming ever more disk space as you free it.  The "du" calls I've seen
mentioned will help you track that down, as the file will probably be
one of the largest files on disk.

The relevant section of the manual page follows.

+|-L [l] This  option  enables  (`+')  or disables (`-') the listing of
				 file link counts, where they are available - e.g., they aren't
				 available for sockets, or most FIFOs and pipes.

				 When  +L  is specified without  a following number, all link
				 counts will be listed.  When -L is specified (the default), no
				 link counts will be listed.

It'd also be nice to get a report on whether the problem is now solved,
by the way.

Cheers,
-- 
Jason Parker-Burlingham
<jasonp at panix.com>
(Watch this space)