Comments on: Why command df and du reports different output?

By: darko

darko — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 07:12:08 +0000

It solves problem on one server, but second one have 12 GB diif on du and df. Nobody mention this situation, couse it is very rarely – it turns to be some files hidden under mounted directory.

By: Jim Knoll

Jim Knoll — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 15:15:52 +0000

one semi related thing….
other than open files inode allocations can leave phantom disk space reported by du that is not reported by ls

if some dir had crap loads of files, especially if they were long file names, the OS will create new inodes to hold all the dir info. Even when the files are rm * the size reported by du can be quite large. The fast way to re-coop this space it to remove the now empty dir.

By: sathish

sathish — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 10:42:15 +0000

my question if i have 3 volume gruops vg0,vg1,vg2 . and my question is one volume groups crashd so how to get that data and how to solve that?
thank u.

By: tim

tim — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 04:30:46 +0000

df and du measure two different things….

du reports the space used by files and folders–even this is more than the file size. A few quick experiments on my system show that 4K is a minimum file size in terms of disk space.

df reports the space used by the file system. This includes the overhead for journals and inode tables and such.

By: Thiyagarajan

Thiyagarajan — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 12:27:56 +0000

Thank you ! for this wonderful stuff.

By: Redo

Redo — Fri, 20 May 2011 14:37:52 +0000

superb, very nice info. it worked well in solving my problem.

thanks!

By: Ednardo Lobo

Ednardo Lobo — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 12:11:02 +0000

It’s possible copy (cp) or link (ln) file’s data after delete it (demo.txt), while vi is in running? In other words, label it (ie, name it) again?

Thank you very much!

By: kunal

kunal — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 09:52:55 +0000

Thanks for wonderful solution…

By: rommy

rommy — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 06:27:26 +0000

thanks, the problem solved!

By: Jonas

Jonas — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 17:30:46 +0000

Thank you! This article was very useful to me.

By: Chetan Rane

Chetan Rane — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:42:32 +0000

Hi,

My problem is solved now, I restarted mysql service, and it cleared the space for filesystem.

Thanks
Chetan

By: jnicol

jnicol — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 17:26:39 +0000

Awesome, learn something new every day!

lsof on my CentOS 5 server includes a handy note if a file with an open FD has been deleted:

# lsof -n -P | grep deleted rsync 29911 root 3r REG 8,17 15496725683 26230786 /an/old/file (deleted)

kill the process, problem solved!

By: Chetan Rane

Chetan Rane — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 16:55:21 +0000

Hi,

I have a similar problem, on our server we have a lvm partition which shows with df -h command
/dev/mapper/VG01-LV01 549G 514G 7.3G 99% /u01
it shows 99 % used, whereas if i do du -sh the output is as follows.
du -sh /u01
39G /u01/

we checked the command as lsof and it show the deleted file with big size.
my question how to resolve the problem, how can i free up the space.
will a simple reboot solve it, as it is a production system i cannot just reboot the server.

Thanks in advance.

–Chetan

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 17:47:37 +0000

Thank you, this was very helpful.

By: sonny

sonny — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 21:41:52 +0000

I HAVE A PROBLEM . I HAVE A GRAPHIC MODE DOWN DUE TO APPARENTLY NOT ENOUGH SPACE TO LOAD IT … WHEN I TYPE df -h it shows me this
/dev/sda1 36G 35G 0 100% /
varrun 244M 104K 244M 1% /var/run
varlock 244M 0 244M 0% /var/lock
procbususb 244M 88K 244M 1% /proc/bus/usb
udev 244M 88K 244M 1% /dev
devshm 244M 0 244M 0% /dev/shm
lrm 244M 33M 211M 14% /lib/modules/2.6.20-15-generic/volatile
WHICH SHOWS I HAVE NOT ENOUGH SPACE LEFT FOR THE GRAPHIC PROCESS TO RUN

THEN RIGHT AT THE ROOT I TYPE THIS
sudo du -sk *|sort -rn
31170836 home
2226844 usr
2091700 var
151540 lib
17036 boot
10788 etc
6084 sbin
4912 bin
1324 root
104 dev
24 tmp
16 lost+found
12 media
12 fdir1
8 opt
4 srv
4 prueba3
4 mnt
4 initrd
0 vmlinuz
0 sys
0 proc
0 initrd.img
0 cdrom
WHICH SHOWS THAT MY HOME PARTION IS THE ONE CAUSING THE PROBLEM
NEXT I DO THIS
cd /home
sudo du -sk *|sort -rn
31169040 user1
940 user2
816 user3
20 user4
16 user5

WHICH SHOWS ME THAT DIR user1 IS USING LOTS OF SPACE
THEN I DO THIS
cd user1
sudo du -sk *|sort -rn
and it shows me this

808840 Desktop
67712 archive1
30168 archive2
16112 archive3
11556 archive4
4116 archive5
1504 archive6
1024 archive7
408 archive8
168 archive9
116 archive10
32 archive11
16 archive12
16 archive13
12 archive14
12 archive15
4 archive16
4 archive17
4 archive18
4 archive19
4 archive20
4 archive21
4 archive22
0 archive23
My problem IS THAT THE HEAVY ARCHIVES DON’T SEEM TO BE SHOWING THEMSELVES SO THAT I CAN ERASE THEM.. HOW CAN I LOCATE THEM?

By: arnike

arnike — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 23:02:39 +0000

Hi
I have all the same. Does anybody know how to solve it?

By: Martin

Martin — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 12:47:17 +0000

thanks a lot for this hint! It worked perfectly on my machine.

By: pankaj

pankaj — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 11:49:14 +0000

I have the same problem with TRUE64 Unix.

I have fileset as /usr which is showing me 3021256KB used after df -k & after du -k it is showing me 1648760KB.

Please give me solution to resolve this problem.

By: Bu

Bu — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 14:19:02 +0000

Hello, I have the same problem, but the solution you proposed just don’t work for me.
I have my /var folder quite full : 2.7go of 2.8go, that’s what’s indicated by “df” command, while “du” states only 628mo… Nothing strange pointed out by “lsof”, only a few files of less than 1mo showed up.
Pretty annoying…
Thanks in advance for any help

By: NykO18

NykO18 — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 08:18:56 +0000

Thank you so much, because your solution (although strange at first) worked perfectly on one of our servers that were stating 5.1 Go instead of 4.5 Go. Unfortunately, repeating the same operation on the second server that has the same problem didn’t worked. I’m stil looking for a solution.