100 % inodes in root directory, how to free inodes?

Question

df -i
Filesystem-----Inodes-----Iused-----IFree-----IUse-----Mounted on
dev/sda2-------732960-----727804-----5156-----100%---- /

Only these 2 are having higest inodes, rest all are too low. what can be done to free up inodes?

Proc 10937 inodes

Sys 22504 inodes

apt-get -f install says no space left

df -i output image

apt-get -f install output error image

inodes search output image -

var log is only 26Mb (highest in var directory)

Answer 1

I was experiment the same issue some weeks ago, and this procedure was solve the problem.

First, search where is the most space use

    for i in /*; do echo $i; find $i |wc -l; done

Pay attention when some directories take more time to be readed. In my case was the /var/ where take more time searching.

So run that:

    for i in /var/*; do echo $i; find $i |wc -l; done

After that, run the same command to /var/log/* and detect a lot small files on the squid3 logs.

After run an rm -rfv /var/log/squid3/access.log* (and restart squid3) the problem was solved, and the IUSE% change from 100 to 13.

Regards.

Answer 2

I can see two options.

You can backup the whole filesystem, than recreate it with higher number of inodes.

Or you can mount another drive to the path with many files and move the files to that drive, so you will keep the structure as mentioned by @vembutech . Sadly, I can't upvote that one yet.

Answer 3

If you use docker, remove all images. They used many space.... Work to me

#!/bin/bash
# Stop all containers
docker stop $(docker ps -a -q)
# Delete all containers
docker rm $(docker ps -a -q)
# Delete all images
docker rmi $(docker images -q)

Answer 4

One option you can delete or move files to another drive. Or mount a higher capacity drive to a new directory on /dev/sda2 drive and move the files.

Answer 5

Just to add a point to the above comments, better to use a slightly modified version of the above command, especially in of symlinks-

For example: /bin -> usr/bin

for i in /*; do echo $i; find $i |wc -l; done
/bin
1

Just use a slash after "find $i/" and then you can see the better result.

for i in /*; do echo $i; find $i/ |wc -l; done
/bin
865

Similary for "lib", "lib64" also you can observe the similar behaviour.