var used space is not right

[Chuck Swiger]

David Loszewski wrote:
> I have a troubling problem that I can't seem to figure out.  For the
> past week my /var has been keep filling up on me, mostly because I
> have a 500MB /var partition and it says that 452MB of it is used but
> only 772K is available.

You probably tried to delete files which are still held open by a 
running process: the system can't reuse that space until the process 
exits.  Try rebooting and see whether that frees up the space.

If so, next time use "cat /dev/null >! logfile" or whatever...

-Chuck