disk usage

[me-5yx05kfkO/aqeI1yJSURBw at public.gmane.org (Matthew Gillen)]

On 11/24/2009 11:10 AM, Dan Kressin wrote:
> --- On Tue, 11/24/09, Matthew Gillen <me-5yx05kfkO/aqeI1yJSURBw at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>> Guess I'll have to reboot.  That stinks.
> 
> You could try this first:
> ls -l /proc/*/fd/ | grep deleted
> 
> /proc generally show missing open files as "filename (deleted)".

Hot damn!  That helped me nail it.  I used a slight variation on that ( "lsof
| grep deleted" ) to get the processes that owned deleted files, but I didn't
know until you suggested that that it would report deleted files that way.

There were several entries there, some owned by mysql, some by mythtv.  Turns
out there was a runaway commercial-flagging job by mythtv that wouldn't die (I
must have missed it in my eye-ball inspection of 'ps' output).  The funny
thing is that it wasn't a working file for the video that was eating all the
space, it was the mythbackend-log file!  The mythtv backend process had
rotated that log file out and deleted it, but since the commercial-flagging
process still had a handle it kept it around (and presumably it was filling it
with nonsense).

Thanks,
Matt