Disk space - help!

[eeijlar]

Hi,

Something is eating up my disk space at a rate of knots.. I have deleted tons of stuff including an enormous file, but df -a is still reporting no space:

Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda7             20641788   6969536  12623612  36% /
proc                         0         0         0   -  /proc
sysfs                        0         0         0   -  /sys
debugfs                      0         0         0   -  /sys/kernel/debug
udev                    512948       132    512816   1% /dev
devpts                       0         0         0   -  /dev/pts
/dev/sda8             36123168  34287900       248 100% /home
securityfs                   0         0         0   -  /sys/kernel/security
fusectl                      0         0         0   -  /sys/fs/fuse/connections
none                         0         0         0   -  /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc
proc                         0         0         0   -  /var/lib/ntp/proc

Any suggestions?

[jnewby]

I use Gnome, so I use the "Disk Usage Analyzer" to see exactly where the disk space is used up. It will give you a nice pie-like chart.

[cjcox]

On Tue, 2009-06-30 at 21:56 +0000, eeijlar wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Something is eating up my disk space at a rate of knots.. I have
> deleted tons of stuff including an enormous file, but df -a is still
> reporting no space:

If the file/files being written to are still open, deleting them does
NOT result in free space. Not until the files are closed.

Just fyi.

You can use tools like lsof to check to see if the file(s) you removed
are in fact still open and you can use that tool to track down the pid
and perhaps kill it.

[queequeg]

Originally Posted by eeijlar

Hi,

Something is eating up my disk space at a rate of knots.. I have deleted tons of stuff including an enormous file, but df -a is still reporting no space:


Any suggestions?

Kdirstat is the KDE utility that does what jnewby mentions above. It's in the standard oss repo.

When you delete files, does the free space increase only to drop down to zero again? Is there a runaway process creating files somewhere? (Run "top" from a command line to see if anything weird shows up)

[eeijlar]

Hi,

Thanks everyone for their replies...

That kdirstat utitlity is amazing... I found the problem, there is a file called .xsession-errors which is using up 98% of the available space. I don't know where it came from, and why it's so enormous. The odd thing is that it must be something I installed as it is now happening on my computer at work too...

/jlar

[eeijlar]

I had a look at the xsession-errors file and it has 28Gigs of this:

Oracle SQL Developer
 Copyright (c) 2008, Oracle. All rights reserved.  

X Error: BadAccess (attempt to access private resource denied) 10
  Major opcode: 2 (X_ChangeWindowAttributes)                     
  Resource id:  0x3600006                                        
krunner_lock(8188) KxkbCore::settingsRead: Kxkb is hidden for single layout 
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device                             
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device                             
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device                             
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device                             
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device                             
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device                             
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device                             
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device                             
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device                             
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device                             
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device                             
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device                             
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device                             
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device                             
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device                             
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device                             
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device                             
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device                             
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device                             
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device                             
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device                             
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device                             
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device                             
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device                             
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device                             
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device                             
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device                             
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device                             
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device                             
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device                             
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device
HistoryFile::add.write: No space left on device
--More--(0%)

Stumped!

[eeijlar]

I have had to return to Windoze unfortunately... I deleted the xsession file as recommended on other postings. When I logged in my KDE profile seems to have reverted back to some default. All my changes are gone, and it insists in starting up the Evolution mail client even though I never use it, and it cannot be killed.

Any ideas, greatly appreciated.

/jlar

[BenderBendingRodriguez]

Deleting just this file wouldn't make your system start up evolution because those settings are not stored in xsession-errors file. You must have done something more to the system.

[eeijlar]

Well... it seems to have replaced my profile with the default. I ended up having to remove the file on both my work machine, and my laptop. It reverted to the default profile on both, and I am certain I didn't make any other changes.

[eeijlar]

If this happens to anyone else... just empty xsession-errors rather than deleting it. From a console:

> .xsession-errors

Deleting it, seems to mess up your profile.