Find the Largest Open Files and Their Owner(s) on Linux with lsof
In this article we covered finding the largest files on a file system. Often this doesn't account for the whole story when you scramble to clear up a filled volume; for as long as a process exists which has opened a given file that file will - even if apparently deleted - continue to exist until that process releases it.
This strategy has numerous benefits, not the least of which is the ability to upgrade libraries and binaries in-place. The software which relies on these libraries continues to run using the version it was started up with, preventing crashes and undefined behaviour due to version mismatching - giving you time to update the binaries themselves before reloading for minimal downtime.
Unfortunately, this can result in a confusing condition. You may have deleted a 400MB log file expecting to have immediately freed 400MB yet find that
If we pipe
For example:
To view more or less than
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