On Thu, Dec 22, 2005 at 08:49:18AM +0000, Martijn van Buul wrote:
> Hello.
> 
> Last night, my laptop suddenly started yelling "Filesystem full on /usr",
> out of nowhere. I had been doing a massive rebuild, so my first assumption
> was that something had gone beserk, as I usually have around 12GB free.
> 
> However, I was unable to find the culprit. 'df' claimed that the disk was
> 105% full, all emergency blocks used, but 'du' could only account for about
> 4G (It's a 16GB filesystem). So I rebooted to single-user mode, did an
> fsck -f, which didn't find anything, and presto: /usr is at 23% capacity 
> once again. 
> 
> Any idea what might've gone wrong?

Maybe you had an open but unlinked (log?)file of ~12G?
It would use space because it is still in use but `du' would not list it
as it is unlinked.
During reboot this file would be freed and space reclaimed.

> -- 
>     Martijn van Buul - pino@dohd.org - http://www.stack.nl/~martijnb/
> 	 Geek code: G--  - Visit OuterSpace: mud.stack.nl 3333
>  The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new
> discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny ...' Isaac Asimov

-- 
Juergen Hannken-Illjes - hannken@eis.cs.tu-bs.de - TU Braunschweig (Germany)