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I've been facing an issue that while using lsof | grep deleted command, I got the following result:

sendmail  11633  smmsp    3uW     REG                8,7    329818112    8119977 /var/spool/clientmqueue/dft4CCv1K5011633 (deleted)
tcpdump   11759   pcap    4w      REG                8,7 446113333248   41846283 /var/kalsym/logs/CAPTimedOUT_monitor/capAbort_2015-05-12_17-57-01.pcap (deleted)

Then I follow this procedure.

cd /proc/11759/fd
> /proc/11759/fd/4

but after that, no effect has been observed on /var size. I searched a lot on the Internet regarding this issue and tried all possible ways, but in vain. Please suggest me the way to overcome this issue.

Michael
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Nauman Shakil
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3 Answers3

4

You need to kill the process in order to free up the disk space. In future you can truncate the file using 

    echo "" > file_name

instead of deleting the file, if the file is being used by any running process.

Gaurav Pundir
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    echo "" does write a newline to the file. To truncate it use :> <file> or echo -n > <file> (if supported). – Marco Feb 01 '16 at 12:45
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cat /dev/null > /proc/PID/fd/4
don_crissti
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rafa
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-2

This will also clear the contents of a file

cp /dev/null filename
don_crissti
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Abdiel Rosario
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    No it won't. It will update the timestamp on the file, but will leave the contents unaltered. It will create an emtpy file if there was not one there already though – Eric Renouf Feb 01 '16 at 15:34
  • Eric is correct. Touch will not clear the contents of the file. My bad. – Abdiel Rosario Feb 01 '16 at 15:38
  • Still not quite, that would try to execute filename and redirect it's stdin to be from /dev/null. You can look at the comment from Marco to see an example of how to use redirection to do this (it works by running an "empty" command : and redirecting the output of that into the file) – Eric Renouf Feb 01 '16 at 15:40
  • Refer to linkDifference between cat and '>' to zero out a file Answers from Patrick and Stéphane Chazelas – Abdiel Rosario Feb 01 '16 at 15:57