File system bafflement

[R Kimber]

On Tue, 2 Sep 2014 14:09:59 -0400
Robert Heller wrote:

> > So is rebooting a solution to this sort of problem?  
> 
> Yes.  Less drasticly, sending SIGHUP to syslogd will also work (assuming
> it is specificly syslogd that is hanging onto the open file).  Basically,
> doing the needful thing to whatever process is hanging onto the unlinked
> file, whether that means sending it a signal to close its open files and
> re-open new ones (which is what SIGHUP tells syslogd to do), or simply
> killing off whatever wedged process that is doing this.  syslogd is just
> a common deamon that causes this, esp. when a novice sys admin sees his
> disk space vanishing and decides to something like
> 'bzip2 /var/log/syslog' and then wonders why his disk space usage just
> got *worse* and du ceases to be helpful or accurate (when compared to df).

OK. I rebooted, but df still says 100% use for root filesystem, and I get a
window that says:-
The volume "filesystem root" has only 0 bytes disk space remaining.

And this means that I can't do any security updates because the software
updater doesn't think there's enough space.

It's starting to look like a complete re-install .....

- Richard.
-- 
Richard Kimber