On Fri, Sep 11, 2015 at 3:52 PM, zep zgreenfelder@gmail.com wrote:
did you (or someone else with root access) possibly delete a very large file in /var that may still have been in use? it's very annoying but if you do a rm on a large file under /var that is still open by some process for writing, it won't actually clear the space. you can overcome that by just truncating the file instead of doing an rm (e.g. either > /var/log/bigfile or cp /dev/null /var/log/bigfile). the only way I know to fix the problem once you're having it is to force the process to close/reopen the file... either by killing & restarting or getting the process to do it if it's got that designed in. in practice I've often found it much easier to reboot a machine to fix such a problem condition.
In fact, that's exactly what I did. I have tried to open that 14G .tar.gz file from mc and it crashes several times so I delete the temporary files from /tmp and also from /home where originally I copied. I've rebooted the VM and now the output of df -h looks better:
# df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/mapper/vg_server-lv_root 26G 16G 8.7G 65% / tmpfs 2.0G 0 2.0G 0% /dev/shm /dev/sda1 477M 80M 373M 18% /boot