On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 04:59:25PM -0400, Ryan Pugatch wrote:
Hi all,
Curious issue.. looking in to how much disk space is being used on a machine (CentOS 5.3). When I compare the output of du vs df, I am seeing a 12GB difference with du saying 8G used and df saying 20G used.
# du -hcx / 8.0G total
# df -h / Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/xvda3 22G 20G 637M 97% /
I recognize that in most cases du and df are not going to report the same but I am concerned about having a 12GB disparity. Does anyone have any thoughts about this or reason as to why there is a big difference? I have read a few articles online about it and none have really shown such a large difference.
Do this: mount /dev/xvda3 /mnt du -hc /mnt
And see if you can find the other 12GB.
I usually do: du -mc --max-depth 2 /mnt | sort -n
Though I've recently learned: du -hc --max-depth 2 /mnt | sort --human-readable or some such, but that requires a very recent coreutils installation.