File deletion problem

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (Sep 19), Doug Hardie said:
> I have a situation that I have not been able to track down where on
> one of my servers some process is writing a log file (I presume) and
> it is getting rotated out from under it.  The net result is that the
> log continues to be written to the original file which eventually is
> deleted thus leaving no trace of who or what.  It takes several
> months before its size becomes noticable, but eventually get grows to
> consume remaining disk space.  Given that the file has an inode but
> no directory entry, how do you find it?  All I have been able to come
> up with is to use fstat to find all the open files inodes and then to
> search with ls for each by hand and removing those I can find. 
> Unfortunately this is a large web server with lots of files.

"lsof +L 1" will display all the open filedescriptors with a zero link
count, along with info on the process holding the fd.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com