SUMMARY:Find the process?

From: Sajid Virani (ext1siv@is.ups.com)
Date: Fri Jul 24 1998 - 15:54:28 CDT


Here's the original question:

>/var filesystem is filling up fast and inspite of me cleaning up the log
>files it still is growing. I suspect that there is a process writing to
>a non existent file and eating up disk space. I just cant seem to find
>that process. Also if I total up the size of all the files in /var it
>shows much less than what df reports(df reports 350Mb full where sum of
>all the files is about 50Mb). So where has the rest of the 300Mb gone?
>
>I tried using lsof and fuser but you need a file name to give to these
>commands. I dont know what file is growing. Using the find and the du
>command I also listed the largest files but none of them seem to be
>growing.
>
>Is there anything other than a reboot which will solve the problem?

A lot of people replied and their answers fell into two categories and
both were correct:

1.My statement that lsof and fuser required a filename was incorrect.
So, I did a fuser on /var I did get a list of processes but none of them
seemed to be the one I was looking for.

2.The second group of people kind of agreed with me that they too, in
the past had experienced such a problem. The cause of this would be a
process is writing to an inode that is no longer pointed to by any
directory entry.

One suggestion did mention that to prevent this from happening in the
future use
cat /dev/null > logfile
to properly truncate the logfile.

I guess I will have to reboot the system after all.

Thanks to:
Todd Herr
Casper Dik
Igor Schein
David Mitchell
Daniel Ellis
Neal S. Pressman
Mike Evans
John Dyson
Charles Roten
Karl Vogen
Erwin Fritz
Seth Rothenberg
Michael Sullivan
Philip Plane
Vic Abell
Todd Fiedler
Stefan Voss

-
-Sajid Virani



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