Subject: bug#18178: help

From: Bob Proulx <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 3 Aug 2014 15:31:50 -0600

Jermaine Golding wrote:
> >> I just deleted over 100gigs of logs and my var partition is still at 100%.
> >> /dev/mapper/vg_splat-lv_log 768G  743G     0 100% /var/log
>
> I also rebooted a few times
>
> That still did not resolve the issue

If the file system is full then look for the files on disk.  I like
using the old 'xdu' command to visualize this.

  du -lmx /var | xdu

I like to do this in two steps.

  du -lmx /var >/tmp/du-lmx.var.out
  xdu /tmp/du-lmx.var.out

However I would also just start looking manually.

  du -lmsx /var/* | sort -n
  du -lmsx /var/cache/* | sort -n
  du -lmsx /var/local/* | sort -n

Somewhere you will find where that disk space is consuming your disk.
It is there.  Just keep looking.

Note that as others mentioned the file system is reference counted.
If you remove a file that only removes a link to it.  The space is not
freed until the last link is removed.  To force the file system to
free the space immediately it is typical to truncate the file
instead.  That is what I do before removing the file.

  $ ls -ldog somelargefile
  $ > somelargefile

The shell's ">" redirection to that file will truncate the file to
zero size.

Also if you have any mount points on top of /var then those mount
points would shadow and hide anything that was mounted below it.  Do
you have any mount points in /var?  If so then unmount those and look
underneath the mount point for hidden disk space.

  mount | grep /var

The bug tracker is not a good support forum.  I suggest using the
[email-masked] mailing list for such discussion in the
future.  Or depending upon your software distribution the user support
mailing list associated with it might be a good source of information.

Bob