df & du showing different usages for /var

[Erik Trulsson]

On Wed, Feb 06, 2008 at 02:28:43PM -0500, alex at schnarff.com wrote:
> After nearly running out of space on my /var partition recently, I went in 
> to clean things up and ensure that it didn't happen again. Using the "du" 
> command to look for offending directories and files, I wiped out a bunch of 
> old Apache and Qmail logs...and then found that I was still using 90% of 
> the partition. So I cd'd over to /var, and got this rather surprising set 
> of results:
> 
> [alex at tms /var]$ sudo du -sh
> 395M    .
> [alex at tms /var]$ df -h
> Filesystem     Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
> /dev/ad4s1a    484M    126M    320M    28%    /
> devfs          1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /dev
> /dev/ad4s1f    269G     40G    207G    16%    /data
> /dev/ad4s1d    9.7G    7.2G    1.7G    81%    /usr
> /dev/ad4s1e    1.9G    1.6G    173M    90%    /var
> 
> These wildly different results have me confused. How in the world can there 
> be a ~1.2GB difference between the disk space in use as reported by these 
> two tools? Which is right? More importantly, how do I fix this?


http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/disks.html#DU-VS-DF





-- 
<Insert your favourite quote here.>
Erik Trulsson
ertr1013 at student.uu.se