Problem with DF

[Abi Akalay]

df is incorrectly reporting disk space The only way around this is to reboot, is there another way?

This problem doesn't happen all the time, but I have seen it with two of our customers.

As an example a partision will be showing 95% used, aftre restart it drops to 25% used.

Any Ideas?

[Steven E. Protter]

You can identify the and kill the process holding the space open.

fuser -cu /filesystem

kill proccesses

or kill them all

fuser -cuk /filesystem
This command is dangerous and can crash applications. It should be used only as a last resort.

SEP

[Bill Hassell]

df is working fine. When you restart, programs that have temporary files open will be terminated and the space returns. Since there is a large amount of space that is recovered, use the du command to map the directory by size:

du -kx /my_dir | sort -rn > /var/tmp/du.log

Run this when /my_dir is almost full and then again (into a different file) after a reboot. Now compare the two listings. The directory with the biggest difference will be the location of the temp file(s). Use ll to sort the contents by size:

ll /my_dir/big_dir | sort -rnk5 | head

As before, run the ll command on the suspect directory before and after a reboot.

[Sanjay_6 · Accepted solution]

Hi Abi,

The reason you might be seeing the problem with reporting free space is because there is a process that has locked up space on the filesystem or a large file used by the process was deleted and the space was not freed up. Instead of rebooting if you can identify the process and just restart the process, it will drop the utilization back to normal levels.

We run into this type of situation very often and lsof is a big help over there. You can download lsof from this link if you want,

http://hpux.cs.utah.edu/hppd/hpux/Sysadmin/lsof-4.70/

Hope this helps.

Regds