Disk is full but du (disk usage) does not give any clues which directory contains the data

toom

1/26/24, 12:34 PM

I have a strange problem. My harddrive is according to df -h full:

$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
tmpfs           383M  1.1M  382M   1% /run
/dev/sda1        38G   36G     0 100% /
tmpfs           1.9G     0  1.9G   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
/dev/sda15      253M  1.1M  252M   1% /boot/efi
tmpfs           383M  4.0K  383M   1% /run/user/1000

But, when I want to check which directory is eating up how much space I get the following output:

$ sudo du -ahd 1 | sort -h
du: cannot access './proc/1204547/task/1204547/fd/4': No such file or directory
du: cannot access './proc/1204547/task/1204547/fdinfo/4': No such file or directory
du: cannot access './proc/1204547/fd/3': No such file or directory
du: cannot access './proc/1204547/fdinfo/3': No such file or directory
0   ./bin
0   ./dev
0   ./lib
0   ./lib32
0   ./lib64
0   ./libx32
0   ./proc
0   ./sbin
0   ./sys
4.0K    ./media
4.0K    ./mnt
4.0K    ./srv
16K ./lost+found
56K ./tmp
80K ./root
1.1M    ./run
5.9M    ./etc
39M ./home
121M    ./boot
152M    ./opt
1.4G    ./snap
1.8G    ./var
2.1G    ./usr
5.6G    .

I am actually confused because I'd expect here to see the directory which contains all this data. But adding up the numbers does not yield 36GB of data.

What is going on here?

0 + 1

disk-usage

toom

1/26/24, 1:15 PM

Yes it did. I had to restart a service on my machine and after that the memory was freed. Strange, never had this before....

Elon Musk

I sit in a Tesla and translated this thread with Ai:

EN: Disk is full but du (disk usage) does not give any clues which directory contains the data

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