[Discuss] strange behaviour

[dan moylan]

matthew gillen writes:

>On 07/01/2011 11:23 AM, dan moylan wrote:
>>
>> last night, running ubuntu 11.04 on acer d255e, i got a
>> pop-up window advising me that i was running out of disk
>> space.  sure enough, df told me that i was at 98% with less
>> that 1GB out of 40 available on /home.  so i went to /home,
>> but du -s showed only 21GB in use. ???  i shut down and went
>> to bed puzzled.
>>
>> today, i fired up and df shows 21GB in use.

> Yep, I got some help on this list for that very issue.  The old archives
> would have been here:
> http://lists.blu.org/pipermail/discuss/2009-November/034551.html

> But the long and short of it is next time, try this:
>    lsof | grep deleted

> Deleted files (or tmp files) that still have some process holding a file
> descriptor take up space (but won't show up in a 'du' analysis).  So
> likely you had some runaway process that was logging a boatload of stuff
> to a file that got deleted after the process started writing to it.

> Your shutdown killed the process, and thus freed the last fd referencing
> the file, so the space was finally reclaimed.

thanks, and i suspect that i know what caused the problem,
as i had created a runaway loop in a perl/cgi script, which
probably left an file open when i teminated the process.
glad to hear that the problem was no more serious than that.

apprapos, however, while messing around, i did notice a
strange file in /root.  note the following:

root ~[220] \ls -lFhd .gvfs
dr-x------ 2 root root 0 2011-07-01 10:14 .gvfs/

root ~[221] \ls -lFhaR .gvfs
.gvfs:
total 4.0K
dr-x------  2 root root    0 2011-07-01 10:14 ./
drwx------ 24 root root 4.0K 2011-07-01 10:49 ../

root ~[230] chmod 755 .gvfs

root ~[231] \ls -lFhd .gvfs
dr-x------ 2 root root 0 2011-07-01 10:14 .gvfs/

root ~[232] rmdir .gvfs
rmdir: failed to remove `.gvfs': Device or resource busy

moylan 2011[545] lsof | grep deleted
lsof: WARNING: can't stat() fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon file system /root/.gvfs
      Output information may be incomplete.

what's all that about?  can i make it go away?

tnx & tia,
ole dan

j. daniel moylan
84 harvard ave
brookline, ma 02446-6202
617-232-2360 (tel)
810-454-1823 (fax)
jdm at moylan.us
www.moylan.us
[death to html bloat!]