Linux – How to Pin Point Large File eating space in Fedora 18

disk-usagelinux

I can't determine exactly what file is eating up my disk.

Firstly I used df command to list my directories:

devtmpfs                 16438304        0  16438304   0% /dev
tmpfs                    16449868        0  16449868   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs                    16449868  1637676  14812192  10% /run
tmpfs                    16449868        0  16449868   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mapper/fedora-root  51475068 38443612  10393632  79% /
tmpfs                    16449868      384  16449484   1% /tmp
/dev/sda3                  487652    66874    391082  15% /boot
/dev/mapper/fedora-home 889839636 44677452 799937840   6% /home

Then I ran du -h / | grep '[0-9\,]\+G'.

The problem is I get everything including other directories,
so I need to get specifically find /dev/mapper/fedora-root
but when I try du -h /dev/mapper/fedora-root | grep '[0-9\,]\+G' I get no results.

I need to know what's eating up 79% of directory /

How can I solve this?

Best Answer

My magic command in such situation is :

du -m . --max-depth=1 | sort -nr | head -20

To use this :

cd into the top-level directory containing the files eating space. This can be / if you have no clue ;-)
run du -m . --max-depth=1 | sort -nr | head -20. This will list the 20 biggest subdirectories of the current directory, sorted by decreasing size.
cd into the biggest directory and repeat the du ... command until you find the BIG file(s)

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Linux – What’s eating the disk space

Repeated execution of

sudo du -x   -d1 -h /

(down the directory tree) should tell you where the space is consumed. That probably explains without further investigation which application is causing that.

invisible files

If du doesn't show these files then one of the possibilities are deleted files. A file (or rather: its name i.e. its entry in a directory) can be deleted while the file is still in use. As long as there is a valid file descriptor pointing at this file it covers space on the volume (if it is not an empty file...).

cat >file &
ls -l file
rm file
ls -l file
# PID of cat is 19834
ls -l /proc/19834/fd
lrwx------ 1 hl hauke 64 11. Feb 19:16 0 -> /dev/pts/0
l-wx------ 1 hl hauke 64 11. Feb 19:16 1 -> /crypto/home/hl/tmp/file (deleted)
lrwx------ 1 hl hauke 64 11. Feb 19:15 2 -> /dev/pts/0

You can find these files with find:

find /proc/ -mindepth 3 -maxdepth 3 \
-regex '/proc/[1-9][0-9]*/fd/[1-9][0-9]*' -type l -lname '*(deleted)' \
-printf '%p\n     %l\n' 2>/dev/null

It may be one single huge file or a bunch of smaller files which cause your problem. There are about 30 such files on my system now (belonging to only five processes). ls -l shows the size of these files but it seems not to be possible to get this value from find.

After killing the process the space becomes available to the file system (df) again.

Best Answer

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Linux – What’s eating the disk space

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