df incorrectly reports available space left

[ill]

When using df command, it reports 19GB available on /home, however trying to write anything to that gives a no space left error.

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. It seems that your bug report is not filed about a specific source package though, rather it is just filed against Ubuntu in general. It is important that bug reports be filed about source packages so that people interested in the package can find the bugs about it. You can find some hints about determining what package your bug might be about at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage. You might also ask for help in the #ubuntu-bugs irc channel on Freenode.

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[Hans Joachim Desserud (hjd)]

Could you please check what `df -i` reports to see if you have available inodes on that partition? Inodes are roughly explain description of files or directories, and especially with small partions with lots of tiny files it is possible to run out of them. Unfortunately, too few inodes will report the same error message as no space, so this might be what is happening...

[ill (illumilore)]

For the partition that's out of space I get:
/dev/sdc1 116M 989K 115M 1% /media/data

[C de-Avillez (hggdh2)]

I am sorry, but this does not match with what you reported.

The above df line shows a filesystem that is pretty much empty; even more it is just 116 MEGA bytes is size, while you stated, when opening the bug, that the filesystem would be reporting 19 GIGA bytes available.

Please give us:

1. the Ubuntu version you are running (lsb_release -l)
2. a FULL df -h of your filesystems;
3. a FULL df -i of your filesystems.

[ill (illumilore)]

df -i
Filesystem Inodes IUsed IFree IUse% Mounted on
udev 982K 578 981K 1% /dev
tmpfs 997K 943 996K 1% /run
/dev/sda1 7.0M 392K 6.7M 6% /
tmpfs 997K 3 997K 1% /dev/shm
tmpfs 997K 6 997K 1% /run/lock
tmpfs 997K 18 997K 1% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sdc1 116M 991K 115M 1% /media/data
tmpfs 997K 27 997K 1% /run/user/1000

$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 3.9G 0 3.9G 0% /dev
tmpfs 798M 4.8M 793M 1% /run
/dev/sda1 110G 57G 48G 55% /
tmpfs 3.9G 8.0K 3.9G 1% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5.0M 4.0K 5.0M 1% /run/lock
tmpfs 3.9G 0 3.9G 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sdc1 1.8T 1.3T 454G 74% /media/data
tmpfs 798M 20K 798M 1% /run/user/1000

[C de-Avillez (hggdh2)]

Thank you, although we are still missing the Ubuntu version. Nevertheless, your issue may be shown here: https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/faq/coreutils-faq.html#df-and-du-report-different-information and the next FAQ question.

Also, it is possible that you may need to check the filesystem (fsck). Another possibility is there is a runaway program writing to the filesystem (which is, BTW, one of the comments in the first FAQ question above.

All in all, so far I cannot see anything pointing to an error in df.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for coreutils (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[ill (illumilore)]

$ lsb_release -l
Usage: lsb_release [options]

lsb_release: error: no such option: -l