Impact of zero link count files in proc


 
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Operating Systems Solaris Impact of zero link count files in proc
# 1  
Old 09-29-2010
Error Impact of zero link count files in proc

Greetings
I want to confirm about HUGE and old files with linkcount 0 in proc file system.
what is their impact on size of root File system?
# 2  
Old 09-29-2010
absolutly nothing...the /proc filesystem is different from other filesystems. They are all "virtual" files representing various structures and data of the operating system - they do not actually exist on any disk space anywhere and therefore do not have any impact on disk space.

I hope this helps.
# 3  
Old 09-29-2010
Actually there can be an impact on disk space. If you have regular files in /proc/pid/fd with link count 0, then this process has a file open, which is not visible in the file system, but consumes disk space. The disk space used will be freed once the process ends or closes the file.

Example:
Code:
# sleep 1000 <dummyfile &
# rm dummyfile
# find /proc/*/fd -type f -links 0 -size +10000 -ls
97442 12683 -r--r--r--   0 hergp    rzadmin  12935547 Sep 29 09:56 /proc/20251/fd/0

This file (named dummyfile before it was deleted) still uses 12MB on disk until the sleep command running in the background ends or is killed.
# 4  
Old 09-29-2010
Network

Bundle of thanks
actually i had a process which was consuming a lot of space and then it got killed by itself , i don't know how?
Is there any way i can check what was that process and how it was killed?
i have the pid of process saved and i could see that it had created many files in /proc FS
now it is killed but how Smilie
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