Question

I have used du -h and df -h, but I cannot seem to determine what actual files are taking up space. When I remove the files df -h still says that the disk is full. Also when I delete the files based on du -h, the space for sda2 does not decrease.

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2              13G   12G     0 100% /
/dev/sda1             251M   21M  218M   9% /boot
tmpfs                1006M     0 1006M   0% /dev/shm

Answer 1

The trick for finding the big files (that have names) is usually du -a, often piped into sort -n. This gives you the biggest files last (so it doesn’t matter that the small files disappear off the top of the page).

You may have a process still running with a nameless file open that it is writing to when it gets the chance, that is eating up the space. This could be a temporary file that it opened to store data, or it could be a log file that someone removed. The space it uses won’t show as free space, but neither will it show up as in use with du -a (or any other options) because there isn’t a file name. If you don’t know which process it is, you could use a reboot to stop the process (all processes), thereby releasing the space.