UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

Hi all,

recently we had a critical error like one of the mount points /online
was 100% full.

Even when we deleted three ( 3 ) 0.5 GB files available space in /online mount was not increasing

rather

df -k for /online continued to show as 100% full.

what could be the problem, even if files are deleted from /online mount
used space percentage in that mount didnt come down.

Kindly clarfiy this.

thanking in advance.

If you delete a file that is opened by a process the space will not be freed until the process exits.

Thanks for the reply.

I believe

that u had channelized the solution to my query in this way,

some process is pumping data in the mount specified and even though the files are deleted, space is not freed as the actual pump process is not killed.

This was thought already.

But the situation is not so,

none of the process do pump data to that mount.

We entirely have a different mount point for that. Mount point were it flashed 100% is purely a dump mount and that too - manual dump.

I dont think process dumping data would be the problem.

Can u please clarify?

Run this:

Code:

cd /online
du -sk *|sort -nr|more

This will give you a list of files/directories that are occupying the most space in /online. Then you can get the largest files and work toward deleting/compressing them.

thanks blowtorch for the reply,

as i had mentioned in my previous post of deleting the ( 3 ) 0.5 GB files

it was the same command

du -sk /online/* | sort -nr

that was the used to determine the 0.5 GB files.

But my question is without any process pumping data to that mount even after deleting files space is not free

hope i am making myself clear.

From root, run the following command:

Code:

fuser -cu /online

If you have any processes running, then kill them using 'fuser -ck' (if those can be killed) and then try unmounting the filesystem and then remounting it.

After a call to unlink() that set the inode link count to zero, the kernel keeps the file out there until all processes file descriptors are closed for that file.

So an inactive process that has the file open will keep the file there forever.
As blowtorch suggested lsof or fuser are the best choices for finding and killing processes that have the file open.