On Linux, a file may be deleted (removed/unlinked) while a process has it open. When this happens, the file is essentially invisible to other processes, but it still takes on physical space on the drive. To find out how much space is taken up by these files, run:
sudo lsof | awk ‘/deleted/ {sum+=$7} END {print [...]
Tag Archives: linux
Viewing deleted-but-open files on Linux
Posted June 30, 2011 – 6:25 pmLinux pipelines
Posted March 27, 2010 – 11:13 amI recently had a Subversion working copy with several files that were modified because they should not have been under source control to begin with. I had to find all the modified *.Plo files and remove the folders that contained them. I ended up using this, which is the longest pipeline I can remember using:
svn [...]
Kubuntu 9.10
Posted December 18, 2009 – 11:50 amI just upgraded to Kubuntu 9.10. The upgrade pretty much just worked (unlike my horrible experience with the last one which left my computer unusable). A few settings got lost such as the default font size. Nothing broke, though.
A few annoyances did get fixed. Among them was the fact that in 9.04, Flash [...]
“sudo nice” versus “nice sudo”
Posted December 15, 2009 – 12:15 pmWhile re-testing the script mentioned in my last post, I decided to play a little safer. I changed “sudo foo” to “nice sudo foo”. However, it turns out that on my machine (running Ubuntu 9.04), processes launched by sudo do not inherit niceness. From a web search, though, I gathered that they do on some [...]
killall is your friend
Posted December 14, 2009 – 8:56 pmI created a backup script that needed to run as root. For convenience, I named the script backupWeb.sudo and created a script called backupWeb that would call backupWeb.sudo with sudo. Of course, I forgot the .sudo suffix, and the script launched itself recursively. The result was a less-lethal fork bomb.
My computer was nearly unresponsive. Thankfully, [...]