[afnog] FreeBSD filesystem question

[John Hay]

On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 03:38:57PM +0200, Antonio Godinho wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I did not delete the old file, the file was changed from the original to the destination with the .gz extension after gzip.
> 
> > I have recently done a gzip of a 4GB file in FreeBSD 6.2 and the file was reduced to 400MB but this change does not reflect on the freespace for the partition. Is there something I can do for it to commit the change? It is a live system and I can not reboot it.
> 

Is/was it a log file of some sort? Maybe the program (syslogd) still
has the file open? If so the space in the filesystem will only be
recovered once that program has closed that file. If it is a syslogd
file, one can do something like this:

mv logfile logfile.old
touch logfile
killall -HUP syslogd
gzip logfile

If it is some other program that has the file open, there might be a
simular way or the brute force way of stopping and starting it might
also be a possibility.

John
-- 
John Hay -- John.Hay at meraka.csir.co.za / jhay at FreeBSD.org