/ full?

Steven Elling ellings at kcnet.com
Mon Dec 2 18:22:41 CST 2002


On Monday 02 December 2002 00:20, Jim Herrmann wrote:

> Man, I'm learning some great commands here, but I still don't see why DU
> and DF don't match up.

I think the reason they don't match is because du asks the kernel for the 
size of each file and df asks the kernel how many blocks are being used by 
all the files on the file system.

By default when mke2fs is used to create a file system the block size is set 
to 4096 typically.  So as far as the space being used on the file system is 
concerned, a 1 byte file will use up 4096 bytes on the file system.  If you 
have 1024 1-byte files, all the files will take up 4194304 bytes (4 Meg) on 
the file system.  This would explain why df always shows more space being 
used as compared to du.

> Thanks for all the ideas.  Anybody got any others?

Run tune2fs on you root partition and find out what the 'Block size' value 
is:

tune2fs -l /dev/hda1

Hopefully, it is 4096 or lower.  If it is higher, this could explain where 
all your space has gone.




More information about the Kclug mailing list