gorged harddrive

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Tue, 2008-04-01 at 09:39 -0400, Todd Denniston wrote:
> df is showing how much disk is used/free based on inodes and filesizes

'df' is a wrapper round the statfs system call, which reads info
directly from the filesystem superblock. It takes no account whatever of
the apparent size of any individual files. The superblock knows how much
free space (and inodes) it has, and that's that. Assuming it's not
broken of course ...

>  (you 
> can run out of space if you have no inodes left).

True, and often forgotten.

> du -s, du -sm show how much disk space is REALLY used on disk by the
> files.

Including not only their contents but also the system overhead such as
indirect blocks etc. 'du' tells you 'how much space would I recover if
this file was deleted'.

poc