Disk usage error

[R. G. Newbury]

> On Wed, 2010-01-20 at 07:49 +0100, William John Murray wrote:
>> >  Hello all,
>> >            Can anyone help me with a disk usage problem? I have a disk
>> >  partition of 65GB in LVM; df says:
>> >
>> >  /dev/dm-0             65570580  60494828   1744888  98% /
>> >
>> >  However, if I use either du or Baobab they reckon the directories in it
>> >  add up to 30Gb or so. As it is my root directory, and there are various
>> >  others it is a little difficult to get the total, so I booted under
>> >  liveUSB and saw exactly the same - 30Gb used, but 98% full.
>> >      So something is stealing half my disk. If I try to write more it is
>> >  out of space.
>> >      Any ideas how I get my space back? fsck reports the disk is clean.
>> >      Thanks,
>> >            Bill
>> >
> Thanks for all the suggestions. The dead links (lsof | grep deleted) is
> very interesting - I have 49 of them, which seems bad, mostly /tmp files
> from a
>   "gnome-terminal -ssh XXX.YYY"
> which are all 3Mb. However, this is only 150MB, I am hunting for 30GB.
> Rebooting should remove all such, and makes no difference.
>
> Chris Smart asked what 'du' I had tried. 'It was 'du -sh'. Note that it
> agreed well with baobob so I thought that made it trustworthy.
>
>     Any more ideas? I guess I could copy the filesystem contents to
> another disk and back, I have the space for that, but it seems a little
> over-the-top. And it may well come back...

Is /var also in / along with /tmp? If you have a runaway log file in 
/var you can get that result, although that does not explain the 
discrepancy. I don't think anything writes hidden log files.

Only other possibles are cache files in user or root space (.firefox, 
.macromedia, .mozilla, .thunderbird etc...)

Or you could try something like this, to find all the directories, ls 
them and sort the results. It's actually interesting to see the 
results!. (The 'find' portion gives a list of all directories below the 
start point).

#!/bin/bash
for dir in {find . -type d -exec ls -d {} \;}
   do
   if [ -d $dir ] ; then
     cd $dir
     ls -alrS >> /root/junk2
     cd -
   fi
done

sort -n --key=5 /root/junk2

Geoff
-- 
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