The commands df and du indicate different amounts of available space

[Bruno Rebelo Lobato]

The commands du and df/bdf report inconsistentes information between itself. Basically, the commands indicate different amounts of available space.

See above:
### df -k /var ####
/var (/dev/vg00/lvol7 ) :
2420306 total allocated Kb
47021 free allocated Kb
2373285 used allocated Kb
98 % allocation used

### du -ks /var ###
1087060 /var

This is very strange and i need some help please, any of you know this problem ? know a patch or a solutions for this problem ?

Thank's

Bruno Lobato - Manaus - Brasil

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

The difference between bdf/df and du usually is from processes that have allocated diskspace but not yet used it.

Essentially there is a process that may is alive and thinks it has disk space, even if its parent has been killed. Kill the process, the space is released.

Tools:

fuser -cu /filesystem_name

lists processes by owner on a filesystem. Other options let you see the data in other ways.

fuser -cuk /filesystem_name

Big time dangerous, but it will kill all processes on a filesystem, releasing any space.

The typical scenario here is process 10233 is open with a hanle on file /tmp/mydata.dat

You erase the file with rm but the process is still open.

bdf reports the space used, du reports it free. Both are kinda right.

SEP

[Jean-Luc Oudart]

Hi Bruno,

this question is a classic !

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=204443
and
http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=106307
http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=485727
and many more !

Regards
Jean-Luc