NO SPACE AVAILABLE IN ROOT (/)

[VICTOR HUGO HERRERA]

Hi there.
I have no space available in root. A few weeks ago it was 14% used, and today it's 100%.
I've checked every directory in /, but can't find any file out of the ordinary.
Inodes are 66% used.
Any suggestions?

[Devender Khatana]

Hi,

It could be due to some active processes having open files under root or some files accidentally created under root. Can you attach "du /" and "bdf" output to find if this is not the case.

HTH,
Devender

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi:

Look for the culprit this way:

# cd /dev #...or other non-mountpoint directories...
# du -k . | sort -k1nr | more

This will sort in descending order from largest to smallest the disk usage of files and directories.

The most likely directory will be /dev. It is not uncommon to mistype a device file for backup and thus creating a non-special file in /dev which consumes tremendous space:

/dev/rmt/om intstead of /dev/rmt/0m

...is the common mistake.

Regards!

...JRF...

[John Payne_2 · Accepted solution]

Do you have lsof installed?

'lsof -a +L1 /' will give you a list of all processes holding space open, but no file is linked. (Like if you delete syslog.log without running a kill -HUP on the syslogd process.)

If you find the offending process, you can sometimes do a 'kill -HUP pid' on it, other times you have to kill the process.

Another thing to look at is if you have had a filesystem unmounted while your machine was up and running. You can create data under a mount point with the filesystem unmounted, then when you mount the filesystem, you can no longer see those files, but they still hold space in the parent filesystem, because they are really still there. If you have had this condiction, you can look underneath the filesystem that used to be unmounted by unmounting it and seeing what's there...

Hope it helps

John

[Vibhor Kumar Agarwal]

There can be some logs of tremendous size.

The most preferred option is du followed by sort.

[Bhushan Bumber]

Hello
The reason may be the any of the log file or core files.Please see the 20 biggest size file by this command
ls -lR 2>/dev/null | awk ' { print $5" "$6" "$7" "$8" "$9 }' | sort -t' ' -k
1n,1 | tail -n 20

after that find the biggest files and see which files are identical and made recently.

take care
Bhushan

[Cem Tugrul]

Victor,
As an additon to other replies here are some
useful links asked before,

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=842012

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=850529

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=842089

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=887110

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=731677

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=619368

Good Luck,

[VICTOR HUGO HERRERA]

Thank you all for your interest. Specially John. There was a big file in a mount point that could only be seen when I dismounted the file system.

Regards.

Victor Hugo.