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At some point hitherto, mike ledoux hath spake thusly:
> On Mon, Jun 10, 2002 at 03:33:56PM -0400, Robert La Ferla wrote:
> > problem.  I am running a huge multi-threaded process that I redirected 
> > to a file in /tmp.  I did delete the file by mistake.  Could that be the 
> > cause of this?
>
> If the file is still open, which it sounds like it is, deleting it
> won't free up the space until after the file is closed.  Unfortunately,
> the only way I can think of to close the file in this case would be to
> terminate the process.

I concur with mike...  It's almost certainly your log file that's
causing the problem, and the only way to make it stop is to kill the
process.  That is, barring some of the fancy I/O redirection
techniques using GDB discussed last week...

On Unix systems, once a file is opened by a process, the file will not
be removed from the filesystem until all processes which have it open
do a close() on the file (or exit, which does a close()).  A process
which is writing to the file does not care that you've removed the
directory entry; once the file is open it does not need it to be there
to continue writing to the file.  There are many advantages to doing
this, but it does tend to cause a problem with exactly what you're
experiencing.

On at least most (and I believe all) Unix systems, there is a way to
deal with a log file filling up your filesystem, though it requires
that you not care about losing the logs...  Of course, if you've
filled up your FS, you're already losing data, so it hardly matters.

If you have a log file which is constantly having data appended to it,
and you need to free up the space it occupies but need the process to
keep running, you can truncate the file in place (to zero bytes) using
this command:

  $ echo -e "\c" > filename

where filename is the name of your file.  This empties out the file,
and successive writes will continue to write to the same file, but all
previous data will be lost.

- -- 
Derek Martin               ddm@pizzashack.org    
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