/rescue [may or may not have actually been] huge!!

[Richard Bradley]

On Tuesday 06 July 2004 3:11 am, you wrote:
> On Tuesday,  6 July 2004 at  2:59:08 +0100, Richard Bradley wrote:
> > On Tuesday 06 July 2004 2:36 am, Dan Nelson wrote:
> >> Check the inode number of each file in /rescue (ls -li /rescue).
> >> You'll notice they're all the same, which means they're all hardlinks
> >> to the same file.  "du /rescue" should report under 4MB.
> >>
> >> Your space is probably being taken up somewhere else.
> >
> > That's very strange if true, because since deleting the "/rescue"
> > folder,
>
> I'm a little irritated by the use of the term "folder".  Do you mean
> mail?  /rescue is a directory.

Yes, I mean directory. I switch between unix and the other OS family and 
sometimes get sloppy with my terminology. Apologies.

>
> > the used space on / has gone from 550Mb+ to 129Mb.
>
> How do you measure this?  If you created a 100 MB partition or
> thereabouts, you can't store 550 MB in it.

I measured this using kdf. The partition size is 512Mb. I was unable to write 
to the partition, and df was reporting 120% disk usage. Since I rm'ed the /
rescue directory, kdf reports 23% disk usage and I can write to the 
partition.

I thought that all the space was being used by /rescue, because kdirstat 
reported the size of the directory at ~400Mb, but after some experimentation, 
it appears kdirstat counts multi-linked files once for each link, so the 
directory may not have been taking up all that space.

Regardless of the accuracy of kdf and kdirstat, I did receive a "disk full" 
message from "pw" on a partition which now has 380Mb free, so something funny 
is going on...


> 100 MB should be plenty of space for the root file system assuming
> that you have separate /usr and /var file systems (not something that
> I recommend, but that's what the handbook recommends).  I'd guess that
> you've made some mistake somewhere and have been confused by the
> concept of links.

I have almost certainly made a mistake somewhere, but my goal is to find out 
what and not to repeat it. Things seem to be ok now (apart from I have no 
rescue dir).

As far as I can tell, I understand links, but one can rarely know what one 
doesn't know ;-)

Regards,


Rich