Hello listmates, I got a rather strange situation that I can't quite make sense of. OK, I've got a very large data file to sort (hundreds of millions of lines) and I decided to use MySQL for the purpose. I inserted the stuff into a table easily enough. Then I decided to sort it and got stuck as it turned out that MySQL, unless specifically configured to do otherwise, puts temporary files in /tmp which simply was not sufficiently large. Then I changed that directory to a partition that had more space (let's call the new temp driectory /home/big-temp) and now as I am running the query aimed at sorting the data it seems like space, according to the df, is no longer being used up under / (which was there /tmp was) but is now being used up in the right partition ( /home, the large one). Yet /home/big-temp is still empty! So how is that possible? I know there are all kinds of file locking possible depending on the circumstances, file system type, etc - but how can it be that the files, if they exist, are not even visible to ls, even "ls -a", even run by root? Thanks in advance for any clarification. Cheers, Boris.