0 bytes on HD

[J]

On Sun, Apr 8, 2012 at 09:08, Nils Kassube <kassube at gmx.net> wrote:
>> Would rebooting allow the 4.7GiB to be recognized as available or is
>> a reboot just asking for trouble at this stage?
>
> See above - probably it wouldn't help but it wouldn't make it worse
> either.

Actually, this could help quite a bit.  I've noticed that when running
out of disk space, evne deleting large numbers of stuff will result in
the same behaviour until a reboot.  What happes is that you may delete
unnecessary files, and while the inodes are freed up, the tables may
not be.  Rebooting will reset the data the system has regarding
exactly what inodes are free and what are in use, thus that "free"
space will become "available" again.

FWIW, I have a problem with xsession-errors being filled silently to
the point of filling up my HDD... I've actually had a 120GB
xsession-errors file before.  Deleting that one file, because of it's
size, resulted in exactly the behaviour described in the OP, where df
would tell me I had 120GB free, but 0 available,until a reboot.  And I
haven't found a manual way of resetting that.  TIme was, running sync
may have helped the kernel catch up to the actual state of the
filesystem, but it didn't help in my case, so a strait up reboot
worked wonders.