On Thu, Oct 08, 2020 at 11:12:54AM -0400, Yves Bellefeuille wrote: > centos2 at foxengines.net wrote: > > > It's not working, I haven't been able to identify the files. They > aren't > > there. All attempts to measure disk usage of / by files shows that the > > disk usage is only a percentage of available space and that there > > should be space available. > > Sparse files? How are you determining how much free space you have? Thanks for your response. I didn't attempt to find sparse files specifically but there were no files (or dot-files) at the top level of / that contained any significant data. There sum of the sizes of all of the directories at the top level of / reported by du did not match the amount of disk space used at the time of the problem. I don't have a transcript of that session but I was using commands like: find / -maxdepth 1 -xdev -type d | while read; do du -shx $d; done I poked around in /var and /tmp a lot but didn't find anything that would contradict the output of the previous command. At this point I started searching for deleted files for which the space had not been reclaimed. Finding nothing I though there was something I hadn't run into before and didn't know what to look for. I'm not confident I understand your meaning in the second sentence. I didn't try to determine how much free space I had because there wasn't any. The root filesystem was at 100% capacity and services were failing. I was just trying to find out what had taken it all since normal usage is around 33% or so, according to df. Rebooting the computer eliminates the problem. When it comes back up, the disk usage is again at 33%. Whatever it is, vanishes during a reboot.