0 bytes on HD

[Jim Byrnes]

On 04/08/2012 08:42 AM, J wrote:
> 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.
>

Thanks, for the reply. I have rebooted and now have 3.2MiB free.  See my 
reply to Nils for details.  Now I am trying to trace down 29GiB I move 
to trash but some how never showed up there and is still eating up my 
disk space.

Thanks,  Jim