No space left on device

Question

When I tried to SCP some files to my centos machine, I am getting the below error

"No space left on device"

I tried

[root@...]# df -h

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol01 18G   18G     0 100% /

And when I do

du -sh / -> it gives only 5G

[... ~]$ df -i /

Filesystem            Inodes   IUsed   IFree IUse% Mounted on

/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol01

                     4685824  209516 4476308    5% /

seems like the file system is full. How can I find which one is taking this much size?

Answer 1

Such a difference between your output of 

du -sh and df -h 

This will happen only if some large file has been deleted, but is still opened by some process. Check with your command lsof | grep deleted to see which processes have opened descriptors to deleted files. You need to restart the process and the space will be freed.

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