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I am on the university machine trying to estimate the disk usage I have on my space I do

du -csh ./

from the begining of my account, but an error is given that ./Yesterday/Yesterday is not a device, so I do 

du -csh --exclude="Yes*" ./

and the error is stopped. But is there a more elegant way, and why is this error emerging? I can image how the Yesterday of Yesterday gets removed but whats the concepts behind the error. Best,

1) using stat:

[ratz]s0128943: stat Yesterday 
File: `Yesterday' 
Size: 12288 Blocks: 24 IO Block: 4096 directory 
Device: 1dh/29d 
Inode: 714342402 
Links: 90 Access: (0745/drwxr--r-x) 
Uid: (35559/s0128943) 
Gid: (28065/ UNKNOWN) 
Access: 2010-10-15 13:06:07.000000000 +0100 
Modify: 2010-10-15 13:06:07.000000000 +0100 
Change: 2010-10-15 13:06:07.000000000 +0100

2) using stat on Yesterday/Yesterday

stat ./Yesterday/Yesterday 
stat: cannot stat `./Yesterday/Yesterday': No such device

3) using uname for details

[ratz]s0128943: uname -srv 
Linux 2.6.18-194.3.1.el5.inf.1 #1 SMP Fri May 21 12:59:58 BST 2010

4) using df on Yesterday/

[ratz]s0128943: df Yesterday/
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
AFS                    9000000         0   9000000   0% /afs

5) using df on Yesterday/Yesterday

df Yesterday/Yesterday 
df: `Yesterday/Yesterday': No such device

6) mount | grep Yesterday produces nothing

Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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Vass
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  • could you give us more information about /Yesterday/Yesterday ? IS this a regular folder or a symlink? – echox Oct 15 '10 at 11:12
  • Looks like ./Yesterday is a snapshot of the whole home directory, which is usually a symlink. – Wei-Yin Oct 15 '10 at 11:33
  • Can you post the output of stat Yesterday and stat Yesterday/Yesterday? – Riccardo Murri Oct 15 '10 at 14:54
  • Also, what OS is this (output of uname -srv), and what (if anything) is mounted on Yesterday (output of df Yesterday/ Yesterday/Yesterday/ and mount | grep Yesterday)? – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Oct 15 '10 at 17:53
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    I suspect that the fact that your home directory is on AFS is relevant. For your du problem, try du -x (du --one-file-system). I'm not sure if it will work though; otherwise I can't think of anything better than --exclude like you already did. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Oct 18 '10 at 14:30
  • could it be that this is a remote folder that should be mounted, but isn't? – Vass Oct 19 '10 at 14:27

1 Answers1

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Your university seems to be using an AFS filesystem and the Yesterday folder contains a read-only snapshot of yesterday's content in the Yesterday folder. Probably the web page of your university's IT department has some information on this.

Probably you have a quota set for your disk space (i.e. a maximum amount you are allowed to use), you can check your current usage with:

fs lq
Marcel Stimberg
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