[SOLVED] df -h and du -sch * show different sizes

**Marty02** · July 10th, 2008

Hi everybody,

I am running a FreeBSD system but this here is the most active forum that I found and I assume that my question has nothing todo with OS specific circumstances.

So, the var-folder of my root-partition is full:

> df -h

/dev/mirror/gm0s1a 248M 101M 127M 44% /
/dev/mirror/gm0s1e 248M 29M 199M 13% /tmp
/dev/mirror/gm0s1f 2.9G 2.3G 368M 87% /usr
/dev/mirror/gm0s1d 248M 219M 8.8M 96% /var <--- FULL

but when I use du -sch * in the var-folder I receive the followin information

2,0K account
6,0K at
18K backups
6,0K cron
45M db
2,0K empty
2,0K games
2,0K heimdal
4,0K lib
1,6M log
346K mail
4,0K msgs
40K named
2,0K preserve
48K run
2,0K rwho
24K spool
294K tmp
2,8M www
50M total

it shows me that I only use 50 MB. How can that be? how can I detect what on my partition uses so much space?

**ahzadjali** · July 10th, 2008

huuuuuuuuuum, i too faced /VAR full............poor me had to resize with live cd and messed up things. now my /usr is getting 35% how can i resize /VAR which is 14GB and allocate space to /USR...
thanks

**Gunman1982** · July 10th, 2008

Here is an article about that issue: http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/freebs...nt-output.html

In short: If you have a file in a *nix system which is still used by a process and you delete it its not gone until the process ends. However du doesn't see it and doesn't summarize it, df however only looks at the free space and since the file is not marked as free space yet (because the process still uses it) it shows more used space the du.