On Thu, Mar 09, 2000 at 09:24:41AM +0900, Olaf Meeuwissen spoke, and we listened to: > There is something funny about the output of df and du -s. Just take > a look at the typescript below: > > bash-2.03$ df /home > Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on > /dev/hda7 2058900 1652232 300239 85% /home > bash-2.03$ du -s /home > 661643 /home > > According to df about 1.6Gb of the /home partition are used whereas du > -s says it about 1Gb less. Who's wrong? Or am I missing something?
Some programs will open a tmp file and unlink it so that other processes won't mess with it. (Think of it as an anonymous file that gets cleaned up when the process closes it or dies). du won't show these files, because it queries file by file. Since these files don't exist within the directory tree, du doesn't find them and count them. df queries the filesystem to determine how much space is left, and does count the space used by these files. Basically, to reclaim that disk, you need to find the process that is using the anonymous file, and kill it. Or you can just reboot, which should clear it out. M
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