root partition full

[Kerilyn O'Donnell]

I can't seem to find out where all the space in root went to. I was doing backups last night and root filled up around the same time - can't figure out where to start cleaning up.

[Christopher McCray_1]

I would start by looking for core files. Then I would look for any log files, especially ones that are MBs in size.

Chris

[Sachin Patel · Accepted solution]

Hi Kerilyn,
I am sure you mistype something in backup if this happen just after you start backup

/dev/rmt/ has all your space.
Some how your backup didn't went to tape but as a file in to the /dev/rmt/c?t?d????

Sachin

[nancy rippey]

Run lsof and redirect the output > /tmp/lsof.out
Look for entries that have /dev/dsk/vg## in the last column these are processes that can still be writing even though space has been cleared up. In my case it was a glance process. An example of the lsof is
emsagent 1502 root 0w VREG 64,0x2 47387 1884 / (/dev/vg00/l
vol3)
where=emsagent is the process name
1502= is the process number
/ = the filesystem that is being written to
/dev/vg00/lvol3=gives an inidication that the problem could be there.

By killing the process giving me problems I went from 97% full to 65%.

Hope this helps.
nancy

[Victor_5]

Hi Kerilyn:

Generally, core file is the first thing to check if I were you,

find / -name core -exec ll {} \;

Another point: you can use search function of this forums, just put "full" as key word, I am sure you can find more useful threads.

Good luck.

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Kerilyn:

If you were doing backups when your root filesystem space disappeared, it is very likely that you mis-keyed the tape device file name, leading to the creation of a large, space-consuming file.

A common typographical error would be substituting the letter "o" for the number "0" as in "/dev/rmt/om" instead of "/dev/rmt/0m".

Look for regular files in the /dev/rmt directory that don't belong. Remember that files in this directory should be character special files, not regular files, and thus should have modes that look like "crw-rw-rw-".

Regards!

...JRF...

[Bill Thorsteinson]

Usually when you run out of space it is one or two
large files. The command
du -a | sort -r -n | more
usually lists the problem file in the first few entries.

As noted above if you see a file in /dev here a file
got lost on its way to a device.

If space doesn't open up when you delete the file
check to make sure there isn't a process writting
to the file. lsof is the tool of choice.

[Joachim DIESTEL]

Hi Kerylin,
try this little shell-script to find out your
largest files.