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

Stop running blind when your partitions hit 100 percent

🧩 The Challenge

You get a frantic alert that a partition is full, but when you run df it says there is plenty of space. I’ve spent an entire afternoon once tracking down a ghost process that was still writing to a deleted log file, keeping the blocks locked away from the OS.

💡 The Fix

Check for open file handles on deleted files so you can finally kill the process hogging your storage. You’ll need lsof to hunt down the phantom process holding the lock.

lsof +L1

⚙️ Why It Works

Adding the +L1 flag tells lsof to specifically list open files that have a link count of zero, which are usually large log files that someone deleted but a service hasn’t closed yet. Seeing the PID makes it easy to just restart the service and reclaim your space.

🚀 Pro-Tip: Pipe the output to awk or cut if you just want to see the specific PIDs you need to kill.

Linux Tips & Tricks | © ngelinux.com | 11/6/2026