On Sun, 13 Aug 2006, Robinson Tiemuqinke wrote that /tmp on an ext3 filesystem had held 5 million plain files, that he deleted most of them, that though the files are gone just listing the remaining 8 files of /tmp takes 20 minutes. > -bash-3.00# ls -alFdh /tmp* > drwxrwxrwt 4 root staff 4.0K Aug 12 23:17 new_tmp/ > drwxrwxrwt 4 root staff 131M Aug 12 20:30 tmp/ > > Anyone know why the former fatty directory still looks > unchanged and takes hours to traverse even after > 99.999999% files got removed? Another poster stated that on ext3, directories can grow, but not shrink. > If there are any ways to fix this kind of problem > without rebooting machine? I'm afraid of the commands > "rsync -avHn /tmp/ /new_tmp/; rm -rf /tmp/ && mv > /new_tmp/ /tmp" because other applications are > accessing /tmp/ as well. If /tmp is its entire partition, I think that the only way is to reformat the partition. You don't necessarily have to reboot, but you will need to kick off anyone using /tmp . If /tmp is a soft link to /fred/tmp and /fred is its entire partition, you might be able to do something like this. # cd /fred # mkdir new.tmp # cd new.tmp # ln ../tmp/* . # hard links won't work on directories # cd .. # mv tmp old.tmp # # 'twould be best if no one tried to use /tmp at this point # mv new.tmp tmp # rm -r old.tmp There might still be problems if someone had the original /tmp as the current directory or just open. -- Mike hennebry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx "it stands to reason that they weren't always called the ancients." -- Daniel Jackson _______________________________________________ Ext3-users mailing list Ext3-users@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/ext3-users