how do I tell FreeBSD to sync, for real ?

[Danny Howard]

On Tue, Nov 08, 2005 at 04:34:04PM -0500, user wrote:
> 
> Sometimes you delete a large batch of files, or you do some other serious
> FS operations and the output of `df` does not tell you immediately of the
> new disk space, etc.
> 
> If you run something like:  sync
> 
> Or even:  sync ; sync

user,

can you describe a reproducible phenomenon?

Did you delete something from /var/log and you're waiting for df to
reflect that?  This is a common one ... if a process has a filehandle
open, and you delete the file, the blocks on disk are not freed until
the process closes that filehandle.

If this is what's thwarting you, check out lsof. :)

Cheers,
-danny

-- 
http://dannyman.toldme.com/