[Techtalk] Re: Different usage betweed df and du

[Wim De Smet]

On 7/13/05, Sue Stones <suzo at spin.net.au> wrote:
> Mary wrote:
> 
> >This is actually rather useful. It allows you to do really quite
> >fundamental things like upgrading libc, which practically everything
> >uses, *without rebooting*. 
> >  
> >
> That is very cool in my opinion.
> 
> > 2. in your situation, it can mean that deleting something doesn't free
> >    up disk space, because a long running process still has the deleted
> >    version open. This is Conor's theory. It's quite easily testable if
> >    you reboot: rebooting will force all processes to stop. If you
> >    reboot and df and du still disagree, Conor's theory has been
> >    falsified :)
> >
> Well after deleting a few things and saving what I was working on, 
> rebooting was the first thing that I did.  Before posting here, it made 
> no difference to the numbers reported by du or df.  So it doesn't seem 
> like that is the problem.
> 
> The "self tests" on the disc finished too, and its still reporting no 
> errors. At least that suggests that the disc is not going to fail in the 
> middle of my current (uni) project (due next week).
> 
> Is there anything else that could be taking up space but not visible to 
> the filesystem?
> 
> sue

A rootkit perhaps. But I'd think that they'd install a modified df and
not bother with the du. Did you run du as root btw?

greets,
Wim