As you are aware, every process in Linux has its allocations in /proc filesystem i.e. Clear from proc filesystemĪnother way is to vacate the space used by file by de-allocating that space from /proc filesystem. The restarting process helps in releasing the lock on that file which process made to hold it as open. Once the related process is stopped/restarted you can see space will be released and you can observe reduced utilization in df command output. In the case of application processes, you can refer application guides on how to stop, start, restart its processes.

If you can not stop it you can kill the process. Now, in above output check the PID 777and stop that process. Lsof output can be read column wise as below – Use lsof (list open files) command with +L1 switch for this or you can directly grep for deleted in lsof output without # lsof +L1ĬOMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NLINK NODE NAME First, get a list of such deleted files that are still marked open by processes.

To resolve this issue, you need to gracefully or forcefully end processes using those deleted files. df also shows incorrect space utilization. Most of the time files are deleted manually but processes using those files keep them open and hence space is not reclaimed. Here we will learn how to remove deleted open files in Linux. In this troubleshooting guide, I will walk you through steps that will help you to reclaim space on disk after deleting files. Sometimes, application users are moving/deleting large log files and still won’t be able to reclaim space on the mount point. Sysadmins face some issues when they try to recover disk space by deleting high sized files in a mount point and then they found disk utilization stays the same even after deleting huge files. One of the common issues Linux Unix system users face is disk space is not being released even after files are deleted. Space is not released after deleting files in Linux? Read this troubleshooting guide

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