gorged harddrive

Patrick O'Callaghan pocallaghan at gmail.com
Mon Apr 7 21:58:14 UTC 2008


On Wed, 2008-04-02 at 23:13 +0800, Ed Greshko wrote:
> Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> > On Wed, 2008-04-02 at 12:51 +0800, Ed Greshko wrote:
> >> Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> >>
> >>>>> BTW, it might be worth knowing what filesystem the OP is using. In my
> >>>>> case it's ext3.
> >>>> FWIW, the OP is probably happy to have his problem solved.  Chances are he 
> >>>> is running ext3 as most people take the default.
> >>>>
> >>>> What would be more interesting would be to know what file system you are 
> >>>> running.
> >>> ext3, as I already said.
> >> Mis-read it.  Sorry....
> >>
> >> I run ext3 and it acts as I've said...  The output of du and df differ.
> > 
> > There's clearly some misunderstanding here, on one side or the other, or
> > both. Forget it.
> 
> At least I know exactly what is going on and the OP's issue is resolved.  Sure..

I know I said "forget it", but at the risk of beating a dead horse, I'd
just like to share something a friend pointed out, which explains the
OP's original problem.

"du -b" acts differently from "du", and "du -k", and "du -m". The latter
three all give the real disk usage, which for a sparse file will be low
until the file fills up. "du -b" gives the *apparent* file size, which
can indeed be larger than the total filesystem size.

So it all comes down to RTFM ...

poc




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