Disk & Filesystem Management (Du/Df/Lsblk/Fstrim)

Stop getting fooled by deleted files holding your disk hostage

🧩 The Challenge

You finally clear off some massive log files to free up space, but df keeps telling you the partition is still at 100%. I’ve wasted way too many hours chasing phantom data that turns out to be a log process that never let go of the file handle.

💡 The Fix

You need to track down the specific processes that are holding deleted file descriptors so you can restart them and actually reclaim the space. It is the only way to see what the kernel is really hiding from you.

lsof +L1

⚙️ Why It Works

Passing the +L1 flag tells the utility to list all files that have a link count of less than 1, which essentially shows you those ghost files that you’ve deleted but aren’t gone yet. Processes keep them open in memory, so the filesystem can’t actually free those blocks until the process releases the handle.

🚀 Pro-Tip: If you don’t want to restart a critical service, sometimes you can just truncate the file by echo-ing nothing into the proc file descriptor path.

Linux Tips & Tricks | © ngelinux.com | 8/17/2026