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

Stop guessing why your drive thinks it is full when it is not

🧩 The Challenge

Ever stared at an empty partition and realized some ghost process has an open file descriptor for a log you deleted three days ago? You spend an hour running du recursively until your eyes bleed, but the math just refuses to add up because the kernel is still holding onto those blocks.

💡 The Fix

Check your open deleted files immediately so you don’t keep hunting for imaginary directory bloat. It’s the fastest way to find what is actually eating your remaining blocks without a reboot.

lsof +L1

⚙️ Why It Works

This command scans for files that have a link count of zero but are still being kept alive by a running process. Since the OS hasn’t reclaimed the inodes yet, the space doesn’t show as free until you either kill the process or restart the service.

🚀 Pro-Tip: Pipe it into grep to filter by deleted logs so you can kill the offending service in one go.

Linux Tips & Tricks | © ngelinux.com | 7/19/2026