Re: can't ls /tmp when the directory is HUGE

From: Winston (_at_ubeblock.psr.com.invalid)
Date: 08/16/05

  • Next message: Frank Langelage: "Re: can't ls /tmp when the directory is HUGE" 
    Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2005 17:02:33 GMT

    allon.dafner@gmail.com writes:
    > I had a (stupid) bug that caused the creation of a very large amount of
    > small files in /tmp.
    > Now I can't 'ls' the /tmp dir :((
    > 'rm' appears to be not working too.
    >
    > This is what I have:
    >
    > ad@sun1:/ > ls -ld /tmp
    > drwxrwxrwt 5 root 194066659 Aug 16 18:17 /tmp/
    >
    > ad@sun1:/ > df -k /tmp
    > Filesystem kbytes used avail capacity Mounted on
    > swap 35388544 30272 35358272 1% /tmp

    Last time I ran into something resembling this, what I found was: things do
    work, but they take a very, very, very, long time as the system will walk
    down all those directory blocks. It'll take even longer if you have 'ls'
    aliased to something like "/bin/ls -F !*", since that has to open the files
    as well as read the directory entries.

    Deleting the files won't help, because the problem is the size of the
    directory, and directories don't shrink (that I know of).

    Since it's swap on /tmp, probably the easiest solution is to umount then
    mount /tmp, or reboot, which will start you out with a new, smaller
    /tmp(swap) directory. Of course, that'll lose the files in /tmp, too.
    HTH,
     -WBE

  • Next message: Frank Langelage: "Re: can't ls /tmp when the directory is HUGE"

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