Hi, I don't know the answer to this question for sure but in UNIX in general you can have files with "holes" in them. If you create a file and move the file position pointer 2 billion steps forward and write one byte your file will be reported as 2 gig big, but it will in fact be a lot smaller. This is very common with core files for instance. This "hole" in the file is transparent to all other system calls so if you copy the file it will in fact end up being 2 gig big.
This means that du will report it as being 2 gig but df which uses other information will report the actual amount if disk space used and they might not add up. I can't guarantee that it works like this in Linux (as I'm not as proficient with Linux as I was with the now obsolete Sun OS 4.1. Consider this a theory rather than a fact. Regards, Olof Edlund -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Erik Steffl Sent: Sunday, January 28, 2001 2:35 PM To: debian-user Subject: du and df not in sync? the du and df report quite a different amounts of data on my root partition: jojda:/home/erik# du -s -h -x / 110M / jojda:/home/erik# df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/hda4 1.0G 649M 331M 67% / /dev/hdb6 4.6G 1.3G 3.0G 30% /usr /dev/hdb7 18G 9.4G 8.1G 54% /home /dev/hdb2 6.5G 2.2G 3.9G 36% /mnt/old /dev/hda1 786M 702M 84M 90% /mnt/win du reports 110M in / filesystem and df reports 649M used - that's quite a difference. I have just ran apt-get clean (before that df reported 97% used on /), is it possible that df does not use up to date info? Is there anything I need to do before df reports current state (which I think is 110M used)? I checked the man page and tried--sync as well but that gives the same result. TIA erik -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]