[mdlug] Something's eating my /home partition

[Jeff Hanson]

On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 9:59 PM, David McMillan <skyefire at skyefire.org> wrote:
>        I had about 2GB of working files in my home directory.  I eliminated
> them, and got back some free space according to df -h, although only a
> few hundred MB.  A few minutes later, df -h showed my /home partition to
> be back to 0% free.  But I don't have any programs running aside from
> the samba and ssh server daemons.  According to the Disk Usage Analyzer,
> my own home directory only has 92MB of contents.
>
>        I'm stumped.  There's nothing that explains this.
> I looked for ballooning log files in /var/log, but the total of all the
> log files was only a couple gigs.
>

Use the lsof command and grep the output for your home directory.

>        Since the unique thing about this machine vs my other linux boxes is
> that it's a server, my guess is that this is somehow related.  But I
> can't find *what* is eating up all the space in the partition.  Does
> this remind anyone of anything?  Or does anyone know of a good way to
> list all files and/or directories in a partition sorted for size?
>

Use the "find" command.  Something like:
find /home -type f -exec ls -la '{}' \;

This will run "ls -la" against every file found.  Capture the output
to a text file.