Recover disk usage after deleting large file in Linux

Disks getting full on Linux is a common scenario any administrator have probably experienced. There are usually some large files in /var/log directory that can be compressed or deleted to save disk space. Have you ever experienced deleting a large log file and noticed that the disk usage remained the same ? It’s as if the file size usage is not released even though you’ve deleted it?

This scenario can happen if you deleted/renamed/moved an existing file that is currently in use by a running program. This usually happens on log files that are not rotated regularly and then when the file size becomes large, you deleted (or compressed) the file without even checking if it is in-use. Don’t worry, you can still recover your disk space as shown from the example below.

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