[Techtalk] home directory/raid array mystery

[Daniel Pittman]

Maria Mckinley <maria at shadlen.org> writes:
> On 11/11/10 4:24 PM, Kathryn Hogg wrote:
>> Alina Friedrichsen wrote:
>>>
>>> tried to run "du -h"?
>>
>> I like to pipe that into sort -h
>
> Great idea. Not sure why doing that has never occur to me. I don't see the h
> option on the man sort page, and I get an error if I try to use it.
>
> But, I think you meant:
>
> du -h |sort -n
>
> or my preference when just looking for who to point the finger at:
>
> du -h --max-depth=1 |sort -n
>
> I wonder if my RAID array has just become completely fragmented, because du
> does look at hidden directories, and this is such a crazy discrepancy
> between du and df.

G'day.  One of the hidden places that you can lose space - and which shows up
exactly as a difference between 'du' and 'df' - is that if you file is
"deleted" but some application still has it open then it still takes up space.

You can use fuser, lsof, or the output of 'ls -l /proc/[0-9]*/fd' to help
identify where that is used.

If you restart whatever application had the huge file open the space should
come back.  (Which is why a restart of the system often "fixes" this problem,
too. :)

Regards,
        Daniel
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