31 January 2012

Why du and df report different disk usage.

Two different programs with two different goals.
du: diskusage, df: diskfree.
du is used to see how much space is used by files and folders on a file system.
df is used to see how much space is used/free on a partition.
Big difference.

du and df will report different disk usage and there are two main reasons.
Indeed, there are two main reasons and for some arcane reason when I hear people talking about this subject they almost never mention both possibilities.

du calculates the amount of space used by stuff on the file system by (special) files and directories.
df looks at the file system usage: how many blocks are available and how many blocks are used.
As file systems use some disk space to store meta data about the stuff on the file system, so even on an 'empty' file system df will still report a usage of a couple of MB, depending on the options chosen at creation time of course.
That metadata consists of inode tables, superblocks, extended attributes etc.
Those bits have to be stored somewhere, hence the difference in reported size.

The other reason they can differ in output is open file descriptors.
Let's say you edit a file and delete it from another terminal.
df won't report the used size as the inode isn't pointing anymore to the file (it was dereferenced after all), but du will still include the file in its calculation as the file is still open.
This situation is also valid in case where defunct processes are still keeping files open which are since long deleted.

Disclaimer: this is at least true on GNU/Linux and *BSD systems.

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