[CentOS] need to free space on a root partition.

Barry Brimer lists at brimer.org
Sat Jan 2 07:13:46 UTC 2010



On Fri, 1 Jan 2010, Yan Yu wrote:

> Hello, there,   Happy new year everyone!
>    I am puzzled here. Could some expert help me shed some light on
> this?
> this may not be a centos specific Q..
> i have a linux machine. and the root partition (/) is full..
> so I moved a dir from /data to /var (/var is on a different
> partition), and created a link from /data/fa to /var/xyz, the files
> under /var/xyz is about 8G,
> du  /var/fa
> 8701248 /var/fa
>
> so I thought this should free some space for me, but when I used df,
> it gave me similar results before and after the move..   and my rpm
> installation would fail due to the lack of space..
>
> Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
> /dev/cciss/c0d0p6     15235040  15232452         0 100% /
> /dev/cciss/c0d0p8    other partitions have free space....
>
> I was confused on why moving a 8G file to another partition did not
> free some space for me?
> and I did see that the disk usage for the destination partition/disk
> increases after the move..
>
> any pointer is appreciated!

If you do an "lsof" and look for anything that says "deleted" that is 
something that has been deleted from disk but is still open somewhere and 
the disk space can not be reclaimed until the process that has the file 
open lets go of the file.  You also may have hard links to files in other 
directories that will not allow the disk space to be freed as well.

Barry



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