medium10 pts · first answer countslinuxtroubleshooting

df says full, du says not

A server alerts on a full disk. df shows 100 percent used, but du on the filesystem only adds up to 40 percent. What is the likely cause?

$ df -h /var
Filesystem  Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb1    50G   50G     0 100% /var
$ sudo du -sh /var
20G   /var

A.du skips hidden files and folders whose names start with a dot, so it under-reports disk usage a lot.B.The disk is failing, so the filesystem reports random used-space numbers to the df tool.C.df counts swap and page cache memory as used space on the same block device.D.A deleted file is still held open by a process, so its space is not freed (check lsof +L1).

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df says full, du says not

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