This is part of The Pile, a partial archive of some open source mailing lists and newsgroups.
Subject: Re: Root partition disk full question From: Enrico Payne <enricop@pharma.co.za> Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2000 20:49:02 +0200 (SAST) On Tue, 13 Jun 2000, Gary Nielson wrote: > I screwed up a long tar command and wound up writing a tarball into my > root directory instead of one on a much larger partition, and it filled up > that partition, producing a disk full error. I deleted the offending file > and rebooted and the system appears to be working fine, no message log > errors or anything. > > My question is this: Can I do damage to the file system by filling up the > disk accidentally that way? Obviously if I had really hosed the partition > I would know it, but if I rebooted and everything works well, does that > mean everything is OK? How can I tell for sure that I have not created a > problem that will appear over time? > I too have had this happen, but have since taken some insurance, namely: a) Created a dummy file of +-500MB (if you can spare the space - hence insurance, it all costs) in each partition. b) Created a script that is run every couple of minutes to check the available disk space. If space for a particular partition is low, I trash the dummy file and email a warning to sysadmins... (I have caught a number of problems this way). ===