Linux "No Space Left" But Disk Not Full — Inode Exhaustion Fix

Overview

Fix "No space left on device" when df shows available space. The inode table is full.

Key Details

• Error: No space left on device (but df shows free space)
• Category: Linux Filesystem Error
• Inodes exhausted — too many small files
• Filesystem cannot create new files

Common Causes

• Millions of tiny files (session files, cache)
• Mail queue accumulated millions of messages
• Application creating many temp files
• Filesystem created with too few inodes

Steps

1. 1Check inodes: df -i
2. 2Find directories with many files: find / -xdev -printf "%h\n" | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
3. 3Delete unnecessary small files
4. 4For email: clean up /var/spool/mail/
5. 5Create new filesystem with more inodes: mkfs.ext4 -N inode_count

Tags

More in Linux Filesystem

Frequently Asked Questions