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Date:      Sat, 20 Sep 2003 10:37:29 +0100 (BST)
From:      Jan Grant <Jan.Grant@bristol.ac.uk>
To:        Doug Hardie <bc979@lafn.org>
Cc:        FreeBSD Questions <questions@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: File deletion problem
Message-ID:  <Pine.GSO.4.58.0309201035580.6383@mail.ilrt.bris.ac.uk>
In-Reply-To: <FD766CFD-EB08-11D7-B53B-000393681B06@lafn.org>
References:  <FD766CFD-EB08-11D7-B53B-000393681B06@lafn.org>

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On Fri, 19 Sep 2003, Doug Hardie wrote:

> I have a situation that I have not been able to track down where on one
> of my servers some process is writing a log file (I presume) and it is
> getting rotated out from under it.  The net result is that the log
> continues to be written to the original file which eventually is
> deleted thus leaving no trace of who or what.  It takes several months
> before its size becomes noticable, but eventually get grows to consume
> remaining disk space.  Given that the file has an inode but no
> directory entry, how do you find it?  All I have been able to come up
> with is to use fstat to find all the open files inodes and then to
> search with ls for each by hand and removing those I can find.
> Unfortunately this is a large web server with lots of files.
>
> Today I moved some of the log files onto a different disk to see if the
> problem moves.  That would narrow down the search considerably.  But I
> suspect I will have to wait a couple months before I can see the
> effects of the hidden file.

Ideally, install lsof. Or you might try:
	http://ioctl.org/unix/scripts/openfiles
...which does what you're after.


-- 
jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/
Tel +44(0)117 9287088 Fax +44 (0)117 9287112 http://ioctl.org/jan/
Generalisation is never appropriate.



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