How to locate small file consumption creep

[Eric Shubert]

Josef Lowder wrote:
> How can I locate what seems to be a small file consumption
> "creep" on my system.  In one 10-gig partition, I have about 1.1 gig
> of free space available, but I've noticed that some of this space
> seems to go away overnight when nothing is running.
> 
> For example, last night 'df' showed this:
> Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/hda2             9.9G  2.7G  6.7G  29% /
> /dev/hda1              76M  5.3M   67M   8% /boot
> /dev/hda3             9.9G  8.8G  1.1G  90% /home
> /dev/hda7             9.9G  7.3G  2.1G  78% /mnt/hda7
> 
> And this morning, 'df' showed this:
> Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/hda2             9.9G  2.7G  6.7G  29% /
> /dev/hda1              76M  5.3M   67M   8% /boot
> /dev/hda3             9.9G  9.0G  951M  91% /home
> /dev/hda7             9.9G  7.3G  2.1G  78% /mnt/hda7
> 
> So what could account for the loss of file space from
> 1.1G to 951M overnight with nothing running
> and how could I search my system to find an answer?

There are always 'things' running behind the scenes, such as cron and 
anything that cron's scheduled to run. The process that created 
something in your /home partition could be one of many things.

For a hint, you might try running a find command looking for anything 
with a recent time stamp, such as
# find /home -mmin 480 -exec ls -l {} \;
See "man find" for details.

-- 
-Eric 'shubes'