Large invisible files after huge tar [SOLVED]

[jacculus]

Hello,

I recently tried to tar up 30G of music into a .tar.bz2, which ran out of disk space halfway through the tar. The partition now reports itself to be full, both when I try to write to it and using df to view the free space available; however, the tar file doesn't appear in the directory listing, nor does any other file big enough to take up all that space. I tried running fsck on the partition in the hope that it would find this 'invisible' file but no joy, although fsck did claim to have modified the partition (didn't tell me what it had done though.)

Any ideas? Am currently stuck with a full partition and no way to delete this useless file! Googled a few things but no luck.

Cheers
Jack

[John R. Graham]

I apologize if this is too basic, but, your tar file name didn't begin with a dot, did it? Use "ls -a" to see all the files in a directory.

I'd bet almost anything that the file is there, perhaps (through an unintentional typo) just not where you expect. Use "du" to hunt around for directories that appear to have too much in them. Also, if this partition is the same one with /usr/portage/distfiles on it, you can safely clean out that directory to free up some working room.

- John

[jacculus]

You were right, the file did turn out to exist - but it was really weird, the file was in the wrong directory and was named the same as one of the music files - tar had expanded one of the music files to about 10G. Lord knows why. Anyway, problem solved, thanks

[Habbit]

Some assorted advices:

1. If you just want to back your music up, don't try to compress it with bzip2, gzip, etc - you will essentially spoil your CPU time because the usual sound compression formats (mp3, vorbis...) can't be further compressed. If you don't want to lose any quality, use a specialized lossless sound compression format like FLAC, which will pack your files to ~50% of their original size compared to ~70% of general compression algorithms. In other words - just pack it with tar
   
2. If you want to do a deep, recursive copy of some tree (i.e. because you are moving your music partition to/from other drive), you don't know to create any temporal file if you can have both volumes mounted at once - just use IPC. There are two possible ways, and in both I will assume that /media/music is the old volume and /media/newMusic is the new one, as this previous, common snippet shows:

   Code:

   root@machine: ~ # df -Th /media/music /media/newMusic Filesystem     Type      Size      Used      Avail     Use% Mountpoint /dev/sda6      ext2      12G       11G       604M      95%  /media/music /dev/sdb8      reiserfs  80G       32M       80G        1%  /media/newMusic root@machine: ~ # cd /media/music

   
   
   1. Direct IPC through shell piping:

      Code:

      root@machine: /media/music # tar -cp * | tar -xpv -C /media/newMusic

      
      
   2. Named pipes - usable with even extremely rudimentary, non-POSIX shells:

      Code:

      root@machine: /media/music # mkfifo /tmp/music_pipe root@machine: /media/music # tar -cpf /tmp/music_pipe *        # Here tar will seem to hang - that's because its writing to a pipe no one's reading from.        # So, from _another_ terminal, type the following: root@machine: ~ # cd /media/newMusic root@machine: /media/newMusic # tar -xpvf /tmp/music_pipe

   Note the absence of the compression flags ( -z or -j), as they would not save any space (pipes take some miserable 4 KiB or so of memory at once) and just waste CPU time.

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