The restarting process helps in releasing the lock on that file which process made to hold it as open. Once the related process is stopped/restarted you can see space will be released and you can observe reduced utilization in df command output.
In the case of application processes, you can refer application guides on how to stop, start, restart its processes. If you can not stop it you can kill the process. Now, in above output check the PID 777and stop that process. Lsof output can be read column wise as below – Use lsof (list open files) command with +L1 switch for this or you can directly grep for deleted in lsof output without # lsof +L1ĬOMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NLINK NODE NAME First, get a list of such deleted files that are still marked open by processes. To resolve this issue, you need to gracefully or forcefully end processes using those deleted files. df also shows incorrect space utilization. Most of the time files are deleted manually but processes using those files keep them open and hence space is not reclaimed. Here we will learn how to remove deleted open files in Linux. In this troubleshooting guide, I will walk you through steps that will help you to reclaim space on disk after deleting files. Sometimes, application users are moving/deleting large log files and still won’t be able to reclaim space on the mount point. Sysadmins face some issues when they try to recover disk space by deleting high sized files in a mount point and then they found disk utilization stays the same even after deleting huge files. One of the common issues Linux Unix system users face is disk space is not being released even after files are deleted. I always had a copy of what I have restored last time in compressed format.Īlso I have a pause in between restoration where I can go and check what are those files and if all ok then proceed with the script.Space is not released after deleting files in Linux? Read this troubleshooting guide type f -mtime -$days -print0 | tar -czvf $/ -null -T -ġ. Hence what I have done is a bit different. I was doing exactly same functionality but needed to preserve folder structure. The docs all reference unspecified behavior for relative target paths - and the first time I ever tried using pax I was swearing under my breath for an hour in confusion with all of the weird results until I used an absolute path. except - and the last thing worth mentioning - I use an absolute path for the target directory - and so should you if you do it. so the 11 up there in my example command is relative to today - it is one less than today's date - which is the twelfth - and the rest is just a standard "$(date)" format followed by a comma. Multiple -T time range can be supplied and checking stops with the first match. would select all files with a modification or inode change time of 12:34PM today or later. Time ranges are relative to the current time, so. The SS field may be added independently of the other fields. The minute field MM is required, while the other fields are optional and must be added in the following order: Where cc is the first two digits of the year (the century), yy is the last two digits of the year, the first mm is the month (from 01 to 12), dd is the day of the month (from 01 to 31), HH is the hour of the day (from 00 to 23), MM is the minute (from 00 to 59), and SS is the seconds (from 00 to 59).
Time comparisons using both file times is useful when pax is used to create a time based incremental archive (only files that were changed during a specified time range will be archived).Ī time range is made up of six different fields and each field must contain two digits. T - the -Time option selects files for the target archive (or merely to copy when used with -wr) based on their /modification or inode /change (or both) times. verbose - for reporting on files sourced/targeted. s/src regex/replace/ - which modifies filenames in-stream X for restricting pax to the same source device and/or filesystem. link - which creates hard-links if at all possible rather than copying the file-data. wr - when pax is handed both -write and -read options it copies. You can use pax for this like: pax -wrT "11$(date +%H%M),".