Delete a file THAT big? Surely you are joking.

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From: Yossi Kreinin
Subject: Delete a file THAT big? Surely you are joking.
Date: 16:01 on 18 Dec 2006
I run some nightly test scripts at a Red Hat server. Occasionally when I check 
it in the morning, it becomes really slow. Turns out it's out of disk space. I 
`du h` my directories, and they are huge. But all FILES in these directories are 
small.

After some time it turned out that some log files exceeded 2G. When you remove a 
file *that* big on this filesystem (or this kernel, or something), the disk 
space is not reclaimed to an extent which would allow you to actually create new 
files using that space. It is only reclaimed to an extent allowing you to get it 
back after a fsck run. Which costs a sysadmin intervention and some down time 
while the disk is mounted read-only.

Want to clean up your disk? Look for small files, the ones you can remove.

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