You probably have files opened that have since been deleted. du doesn't report them as the names are no longer in the directory and df doesn't report them as they are pending deletion once the last handle to them is closed.
It's a nasty thing to find. Run this: lsof | grep deleted You should find a ton of junk temp files (they will go away when you log out). Look for big numbers in column 8 On Sunday 09 May 2010 00:46:28 Crístian Viana wrote: > it doesn't seem so :-( > > Filesystem Inodes IUsed IFree IUse% Mounted on > /dev/sda6 20856832 108698 20748134 1% /home > > I didn't know that the filesystem could run out of inodes before the disk > space itself! thanks for the information :-) > > On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 4:07 PM, Nikos Chantziaras <rea...@arcor.de> wrote: > > On 05/08/2010 09:21 PM, Crístian Viana wrote: > >> hi everyone, > >> > >> something weird is happening on my system. I can't create new files, it > >> says "No space left on device", but the disk has several gigabytes of > >> free space! > > > > The filesystem probably ran out of inodes. "df -i /home" will show inode > > usage. This can happen when you have many small files; they eat inodes > > but not storage space. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
