No space available?

[boller]

Hi. I have a machine in my network which claims to have 'no space left on device'. I checked with df and found the full device. Then deleted some files off of that device and checked df again:

-bash-3.2$ df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
29741864 28520648 0 100% /

OR

-bash-3.2$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
29G 28G 0 100% /

What's weird is that the sizes stated by df, 'Size' and 'Used' should result in some available disk space, but it still shows Use% at 100%. How is this possible?
I still can't write to disk!
Thanks everyone!

[LazarusLong]

Do you have a swap partition? If so, it's likely that the difference you are seeing is disk space used by swap.

Looks like you'll have to back stuff up (if you can't just zap it) and then really start cleaning things out.

[HROAdmin26]

Files "deleted" while in use (IE - files that still have open handles) are not actually released until the handle is closed. Google: lsof

[boller]

Thanks guys! I meanwhile got some free space. The fact that it just appeared to be available after a while and that most of them were log files of running server-processes makes me think that HROAdmin26's answer was right. I restarted some of the server processes and more and more space was available!

Thanks!