On: No Space Left on Device

[technofiend]

I literally just solved an issue this weekend that was inode exhaustion: there were years of snapshots and traces laying around and the DBAs were confused as to why the database couldn't create a directory to start and was exiting with "No space left on device" when there was 5% storage free.

That lead to the second discussion of why you don't fix it by piping filenames one by one to rm, but either use find's inbuilt unlink/rm if there is one or xargs to rm if not.

[greggyb → technofiend]

Is that second discussion just a performance thing, or are there filesystem implications for one or the other?

[technofiend → greggyb]

Just speed: you don't spin up a new process for each file removed if you use xargs.