Where is my 2G? - MC

[Mark Newton]

Brian Astill wrote:

> My problem resulted from trying to copy 3.9G of /home on hda2 
> to /mnt/hdb7on hda2 when there was only 1.8G free on hda2.  That 
> overflowed hda2 and screwed things up badly!

Brian, filling a filesystem doesn't harm it.

If you use up all the space, delete enough files to free some space
up again.

Some of the daemons may get confused if, say, they can't write to
their logfiles;  But since your usual operations occur with normal
user privileges, and since the last 10% of each filesystem is
reserved for root processes (including the aforementioned daemons),
when your user process hits the space limit there's still usually a
couple of gig free, and everything just kinda copes.

If you've been (foolishly) doing what you did as root, the 10%
buffer zone doesn't apply.  If those daemon processes get confused
the *most* you'll need to do is restart them;  if there are lots
of them, it might be easier to reboot.

You certainly won't have to run fsck.  I think suggesting that
serves as evidence of a profound misunderstanding of the role of
fsck, and the behaviour of filesystems.

Filling up a filesystem doesn't harm it.  fsck's job is to recover
from filesystem harm.

You don't need fsck;  you don't need recovery mode;  you probably
don't even need to reboot.  Just delete the files and get on with
your life.

    - mark

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I tried an internal modem,                    newton at atdot.dotat.org
      but it hurt when I walked.                          Mark Newton
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