[lug] Disk usage discrepancy?

[Joseph McDonald]

On Wed, Feb 26, 2003 at 12:10:27PM -0500, Michael D. Hirsch wrote:
> On Wednesday 26 February 2003 11:38 am, Justin-lists wrote:
> > I just ran into this today when trying to clean up my /var partition:
> >
> > [glowecon at oldschool glowecon]$ df -h |grep var
> > /dev/hda3             980M  295M  636M  32% /var
> >
> > But...
> >
> > [glowecon at oldschool glowecon]$ sudo du -hs /var
> > 92M     /var
> 
> What filesystem is on /var?  There was an obscure bug in reiserfs a while 
> ago that could cause problems like this.
> 
> Another possibility is that you are running some kind of log watching 
> program and log files are kept open even after they have been removed.  
> You might try rebooting and see if that discrepancy is still there.

Yeah, I've learned the hardway that if you remove a file that's still
being written to by a process the inode sticks around until the file system
is fsck'ed. You probably don't want to unmount /var on a running system..
So, a reboot may be in order.

	--joey