How to recover disk space after "filesystem full"

[Lowell Gilbert]

Luke Dean <LukeD at pobox.com> writes:

> Yes, it sounds like a stupid question, but let me tell the story.
>
> The log for my dhcp server filled up /var last night, which meant that
> dhcpd was also unable to hand out new leases, which meant that I had
> effectively been DOSed.  I'll have to look into changing my logging
> policies.
>
> So, to correct the problem, I log into the router, removed the big
> log and several other files in /var to free up some space, and assumed
> this would correct the problem.
>
> It did not.
> Several minutes after freeing up a lot of space on /var, I continued
> to get "filesystem full" messages and "df" continued to show the
> capacity at >100%.  I checked "df -i" for the inodes too.  That was
> fine.  I ran a quick fsck to see if that might shock the system into
> seeing all the space that I'd freed up, but no good.
>
> I ended up rebooting the box.
>
> Was there any other possible solution I could've tried?
>
> Why wouldn't the free space immediately appear as free?

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