Why command df and du reports different output?

You will never notice something like this on FreeBSD or Linux Desktop home system or your personal UNIX or Linux workstation. However, sometime on a production UNIX server you will notice that both df (display free disk space) and du (display disk usage statistics) reporting different output. Usually df will output a bigger disk usage than du.

If Linux or UNIX inode is deallocated you will see this problem. If you are using clustered system (file system such as GFS) you may see this scenario commonly.

Note following examples are FreeBSD and GNU/Linux specific.

Following is normal output of df and du for /tmp filesystem:
# df -h /tmp
Output:

Filesystem     Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/ad0s1e    496M     22M    434M     5%    /tmp

Now type du command:
# du -d 0 -h /tmp/
Output:

22M    /tmp/

Why is there a mismatch between df and du outputs?

However, some time it reports different output (a bigger disk usage), for example:
# df -h /tmp/
Output:

Filesystem     Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/ad0s1e    496M     39M    417M     9%    /tmp

Now type du command:
# du -d 0 -h /tmp/
Output:

 22M    /tmp/

As you see, both df and du reporting different output. Many new UNIX admin get confused with output (39M vs 22M).

Open file descriptor is main causes of such wrong information. For example if file called /tmp/application.log is open by third party application OR by a user and same file is deleted, both df and du reports different output. You can use lsof command to verify this:
# lsof | grep tmp
Output:

bash   594  root  cwd   VDIR  0,86      512      2 /tmp
bash   634  root  cwd   VDIR  0,86      512      2 /tmp
pwebd  635  root  cwd   VDIR  0,86      512      2 /tmp
pwebd  635  root  3rW   VREG  0,86 17993324     68 /tmp (/dev/ad0s1e)
pwebd  635  root   5u   VREG  0,86        0     69 /tmp (/dev/ad0s1e)
lsof   693  root  cwd   VDIR  0,86      512      2 /tmp
grep   694  root  cwd   VDIR  0,86      512      2 /tmp

You can see 17993324K file is open on /tmp by pwebd (our in house software) but deleted accidentally by me. You can recreate above scenario in your Linux, FreeBSD or Unixish system as follows:

First, note down /home file system output:
# df -h /home
# du -d 0 -h /home
If you are using Linux then use du as follows:
# du -s -h /tmp

Now create a big file:
# cd /home/user
# cat /bin/* >> demo.txt
# cat /sbin/* >> demo.txt

Login on other console and open file demo.txt using vi text editor:
# vi /home/user/demo.txt

Do not exit from vi (keep it running).

Go back to another console and remove file demo.txt
# rm demo.txt
Now run both du and df to see the difference.
# df -h /home
# du -d 0 -h /home
If you are using Linux then use du as follows:
# du -s -h /tmp

Login to another terminal and close vi.

Now close the vi and the root cause of the problem should be resoled, the du and df outputs should be correct.