Linux not releasing space

[guna_dev]

Hi All,
We faced a typical problem. We are running Oracle 9i in Linux AS release 3. We had a space issue of temporary tablespace filling the disk. So to free space we dropped the temporary tablespace which is of size 20 GB and recreated in another partition. After dropping the tablespace when i checked for space it still says disk is full. I manually checked for existance of files and it was not there. But still it shows the same space as it was showing when files existed. I am breaking my head for the past two days for the same. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Guna

[b2bwild]

# du /path/to/directory
And see what you get.

[guna_dev]

It shows only 15 GB is occupied but when i do df -h it shows 56 GB is occupied. The total size of the disk is 61 GB and i get write error. That is oracle is unable to write since the disk is full.

[HROAdmin26]

Use lsof to check for deleted files that still have open handles.

[b2bwild]

have you tried command du? not the df.

[Rubberman]

Have you tried bouncing the database server? Even if you dropped the tablespace from one file system, Oracle might not have fully closed the file, so it won't be removed from the file system until either Oracle is shutdown or the system is rebooted. By bouncing the database server, I mean to shutdown and restart the database. That will make it relinquish any stale file handles it is holding.

[b2bwild]

It might be, but if the file is in use. how it can be deleted correct me if im wrong.

[HROAdmin26]

OPEN HANDLES

[Rubberman]

It might be, but if the file is in use. how it can be deleted correct me if im wrong.

When the inode link count of a file goes to 0 in linux, it is automatically deleted. The link count is one when it is created, and each open handle to it increments the link count. So, if you delete the file, but someone has it open, the link count is decremented by 1, but since there are still open handles to it, it might not appear in the directory, but it is still available on disc until the application that holds the handles either closes them, or terminates, which will also close them. So, rebooting the system will terminate all running processes, closing their open file handles, hence deleting those files that have been removed. Also remember that hard links to a file will also increment the link count, so if there are hard links to the file, it won't go away as you would expect. In these regards, Linux operates very differently from Windows systems where it won't let you delete an open file at all.