F9: Why does deleting files not free up disk space?

[rweed]

First, don't tell me to empty the trash.

I ran out of space doing a build. I started removing things...about a 100MB at this point. df shows the used blocks going down, but still 0% free.

I did a df, deleted a 17MB file and then df again and still 0% free (used blocks went down again)

WTF? Is there some secret Trash folder somewhere like with Wine?

EDIT: It says 3870416 blocks available, 3772984 Used, 0 free, Use 100%

-Rick

[ivancat]

tell us, how exactly do you remove files?

also, to make things look better and clearer use

df -h

instead of just

df

[rweed]

I used rm to delete the files.
Here is my df -h output (which isn't really clearer to me as the disk usage is approximate):

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
                      3.7G  3.6G     0 100% /
/dev/sda1             190M   19M  162M  11% /boot
tmpfs                 125M   48K  125M   1% /dev/shm
gvfs-fuse-daemon      3.7G  3.6G     0 100% /root/.gvfs

[ivancat]

Had you stopped the build before deleted any files? Maybe as you were deleting build continued to occupy disk space?

[marcrblevins]

You are using 4 gig for Fedora?

[glennzo]

One command that could tell you what's using all your disk space would be

du -S | sort -n -r | more

Run it as root so you have access to almost all the folders / sub folders. When the command finishes you should get an ordered list of disk usage sorted largest to smallest. You may want to make sure any other mounted partitions are un-mounted before you run the command as it will drastically increase the time it takes for the command to complete if it reads all mounted partitions My guess is that you probably don't care how much space is used on, for example, /media/windows.

Edit: I'm with marcrblevins. 4GB is a bit small for a Fedora install.

[Nokia]

Glenn, don't you mean

du -hS / | sort -n -r | more

by chance ?

[glennzo]

Probably. That command was one given to me by someone else here, a few years back, when I was trying to determine where all my disk space went. How will your additions to the command affect the output, he asks as he runs off to try it out.....

Actually, the h is "human readable" I believe? The / simply means from root folder on down ?

Much more refined than my example Nokia

[Nokia]

Actually, it all started from the missing / sign. In the absence of it, du would have ran in current dir. The -h is just a helper in reading the output more easily. What concerns me now is that, perhaps a simple

du -hS /home/user | sort -n -r | more

should be generally speaking more than enough. Also

 du -hs /home/<user>/.local/share/Trash/

might be relevant.

[bingoUV]

Nokia, this h screws up the sort completely. Human readability won't matter much if the output is sorted well, as biggest offenders are shown clearly at the top.

Maybe some human readability hack should be applied after the sort is done like

du -S / | sort -n -r | blah blah

[glennzo]

So has the OP figured out where the space has gone or has he realized that 4GB is barely enough for a default Fedora install.

[sidebrnz]

The output of df shows 3.7 G total, 3.6 used, 0% free. A moment's calculation shows that just over 97% of the partition is in use and Fedora is, by default, set to keep 5% reserved for emergency root use. Thus, although 3% of the partition is unused, it's not available, either.

[glennzo]

Bottom line, no matter how you perceive the results, no disk space left.

[rweed]

Originally Posted by sidebrnz

The output of df shows 3.7 G total, 3.6 used, 0% free. A moment's calculation shows that just over 97% of the partition is in use and Fedora is, by default, set to keep 5% reserved for emergency root use. Thus, although 3% of the partition is unused, it's not available, either.

I'm logged in as root though...it's 4.5GB because it's a VM I set up just to play around with F9, but got pressed into service for buildling kernels to assist with my laptop install problem.