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Prabesh Shrestha
Asked: 2011-03-27 23:45:29 +0800 CST

No space left on device [duplicate]

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I was getting No space left on device, so I removed some of the files. But again when I try to update my folder with svn update I am getting the same error. Is this the problem with space left?

When I run df -k I get

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and when I run df -i , I get

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It seems like the system has ran out of inode space as you suggested even though I have the space left in my disk. How do I fix this?

partitioning

2 Answers

  1. Check what's the disk usage with 

    df -k

    and 

    df -i

    The first command will tell you how much diskspace (in terms of kilobytes) is available and the second one will do the counting for inodes . If you have a huge number of small files the partition may have still free diskspace, but run out of inodes (which if you don't know about them, you can see like 'slots' in a parking space)

    Ok, so if you effectively are running out of inodes, the only way to fix it is to reformat the partition using different parameters. If you cannot do that, you can try to mitigate the problem by moving part of the 'inode-hungry' section of data to a different partition. Starting from /home top level, you can run this simple script (apologies if it's not 100% fool-proof ;-) )

    for dir in *; do [ -d "$dir" ] && echo "$dir" && find "$dir" | wc -l; done

    It should count for each subdirectory how many inodes are used (in short, each file or directory present). You can repeat the procedure going down a few levels if you want. Anyway, once you identify the directory that consumes most of the inodes, you can move it to somewhere else, and leave inside /home a symlink to the new location.

    Shorter that that, your only chance is to archive (with tar, zip or similar tools) the part of data in /home directory that you are not currently using (and remove the loose files). This will bring the inodes count down, but at the cost of continuously archiving/unarchiving pieces of the storage.

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  2. I always start with the effortless "apt-get clean" to remove downloaded package files when I need more disk space.

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