Pi full, keeps making swap files!

[tylerecouture]

My Raspberry Pi is full and I think I found the problem, it appears to be creating swap files recursively, though I have no idea why.

Each of these has a 100MB swap file:
/proc/self/fd/15/var
/proc/self/fd/15/proc/self/fd/15/var
/proc/self/fd/15/proc/self/fd/15/proc/self/fd/15/var
/proc/self/fd/15/proc/self/fd/15/proc/self/fd/15/proc/self/fd/15/var
/proc/self/fd/15/proc/self/fd/15/proc/self/fd/15/proc/self/fd/15/proc/self/fd/15/var
/proc/self/fd/15/proc/self/fd/15/proc/self/fd/15/proc/self/fd/15/proc/self/fd/15/proc/self/fd/15/var
etc...

There are 20 of these!

Any idea what is going on? How can I delete these files? When I try to trash them in the GUI it fails.

[Rive]

https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentatio ... s/proc.txt

[tylerecouture]

https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentatio ... s/proc.txt

Hmmm... could you elaborate? =D

[Rive]

https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentatio ... s/proc.txt

Hmmm... could you elaborate? =D

You want to know whats going on, look at the proc documentation...

[PeterO]

Do you have any idea what application is creating these files ?

PeterO

[topguy]

Nothing under "/proc/" is actual files is it ? Its a virtual filesystem created by the kernel.

Code: Select all

df -h /proc/
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
proc               0     0     0    - /proc

/proc/self is even more fun, "self" contain information about the process that is accessing /proc/self. It can be used by application to find out thing about themselves.
Do "cat /proc/self/cmdline" for example.

[jojopi]

In this particular case, "/proc is not real" is not the whole story. The swap file does exist, and it is taking up disk space. But there is only one copy of it, and its actual path is /var/swap.

It is clear from the recursive paths in the original post that /proc/self/fd/15 was a symbolic link to /. So you could add that to the beginning of any path, as many times as you wanted.

I am not sure what program would do that, however. At the command line, /proc/self refers to a bash process, and bash should not normally have a file descriptor for the root directory open. Many recursive disk space utilities will keep open each directory they are searching—but they should not follow symlinks. The file manager, pcmanfm, closes each directory as soon as it has read it, so it does not appear to be possible to follow links recursively there.

[topguy]

My Raspberry Pi is full and I think I found the problem.

I'm pretty sure you havent, the recursiveness you are seeing is caused by the special properties of "/proc/" and "/proc/self".
Exclude both /proc /sys and /dev from any searches related to filesizes.

[RaTTuS]

du -k / | sort -nr

[edited for correctness]

[topguy]

df -h / | sort -nro

Are you sure you didn't mean "du" ?

[RaTTuS]

df -h / | sort -nro

Are you sure you didn't mean "du" ?

yes - edited
I've also removed the o option on sort as it needs just to go to the display

[PeterO]

Code: Select all

du -h | sort -h 

is now my preferred combination of switches
PeterO

[RaTTuS]

yeah I like that
I tend to use the -r option when it gets piped into files .....

[jojopi]

I was taught in human school (in geography, I think, not just science) that when you have a column of figures you pick a consistent unit and use it for the whole column. Who has the time to recognise which values are significant, otherwise?

I cannot abide the way df/du -h works, regardless of whether "sort" can handle it. Kilobytes are a bit small, so I mostly use df/du -m.