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David542
Asked: 2016-02-22 11:25:18 +0800 CST

Unable to clear up tmp

  • 772

I had a bunch of files in /tmp that I cleared up by doing $ rm -rf ./tmp/*. However, I'm still unable to 'clear' that information, even after a reset. Here is what I have now:

$ cd Av-bash: cannot create temp file for here-document: No space left on device
$ df -i
df: no file systems processed

I should have roughly 400GB free space on this machine. How can I clear up this space, what do I need to do so that I can create temp files once again? And why isn't df -i returning anything?

The distribution I'm using is:

Linux version 3.13.0-29-generic (buildd@toyol) (gcc version 4.8.2 (Ubuntu 4.8.2-19ubuntu1) ) #53-Ubuntu SMP Wed Jun 4 21:00:20 UTC 2014
linux

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    rm doesn't clear files, it unlinks them. If there were files in /tmp open by some processes that are still running, their space hasn't been released. One way to fix the issue is to restart these applications if you can identify them. A simpler workaround is to reboot your OS.

    There can be a different source of a /tmp full situation. If /tmp is based on tmpfs, you might just be out of virtual memory.

    • 3

  2. you can use following command which will remove everything from /tmp directory which were last modified before 24 hours.

    tmpwatch --mtime --all 24 /tmp
    • -2