linux df and OSError: [Errno 28] No space left on device

I've got a weird inconsistency (although I'm probably just missing something quite basic). While running some script that generates small files on my I disk, I constantly get this error:

OSError: [Errno 28] No space left on device

But when I run df -h, I get:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 15G 12G 2.2G 85% /
udev 502M 144K 502M 1% /dev
none 502M 0 502M 0% /dev/shm
none 502M 72K 502M 1% /var/run
none 502M 0 502M 0% /var/lock
none 502M 0 502M 0% /lib/init/rw

So am I low on disk-space or not?

Thanks for any input!

1

2 Answers

You're probably out of inodes. Try df -i.

1

This may have several causes:

• a process is currently writing a large file, so the disk usage statistics aren't updated till the file is closed. In this case you have to check the total used space by running

sudo du -k /your/path

• there are one or more deleted files which are still in use by some process, so the df utility doesn't take them into account when calculating the total disk usage; you can find these files by running

sudo lsof / | grep deleted

• the filesystem runned out of inodes, which you can check by running

sudo df -i /your/path

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