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Possible Duplicate:
Difference between df -k and du -sh

The problem: I receive messages that I cannot write to disk.

The symptoms:

df -h

  • Size 17G
  • Used 17G
  • Avail 0 Use% 100%
  • Mounted on /myFolder Other filesystems have reasonable space

du -sh /myFolder

  • 4.7G

Disk Analyzer GUI for /myFolder

  • 5.4GB

I also know that a few weeks ago Disk Analyzer and du reported 8GB in this folder. I've tried reading the man pages and a number of the du and df articles here and delivered by Google, but I don't know where my disk space has gone.

I am quite green when it comes to linux, so don't be afraid to dumb down your answers too much.

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Adam
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  • Sooo, I run the command shown there and I get some stuff returned, how do I get it freed to be used? – Adam May 27 '11 at 18:03
  • You will need to kill the processes holding the files. You know how in Windows you sometimes delete a file and it says it cannot be deleted because a program is using it? Linux has a little different solution to this problem. When you delete a file and a process is using it, it doesn't really delete the file, it keeps a special copy just for the process. So you need to find out what processes are using the files and then get them to stop using them somehow. That will probably mean killing and restarting the proceses. – jcrawfordor May 27 '11 at 19:11
  • This problem can also crop up when a file exists in or under a mount point. When the partition is mounted, you can't see the files that are silently consuming disk space. – OldTroll May 27 '11 at 19:38
  • Thanks for your help folks. Restarting the machine killed the process. I'll learn about the lsof command to see how I can delete more cleanly. – Adam May 27 '11 at 23:11

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