【操作系统】linux--系统管理--linux下du和df命令的区别

参考：http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/faq/disks.html#DU-VS-DF

9.24. The du and df commands show different amounts of disk space available. What is going on?

You need to understand what du and df really do. du goes through the directory tree, measures how large each file is, and presents the totals. df just asks the file system how much space it has left. They seem to be the same thing, but a file without a directory entry will affect df but not du.

When a program is using a file, and you delete the file, the file is not really removed from the file system until the program stops using it. The file is immediately deleted from the directory listing, however. You can see this easily enough with a program such as more. Assume you have a file large enough that its presence affects the output of du and df. (Since disks can be so large today, this might be a very large file!) If you delete this file while using more on it, more does not immediately choke and complain that it cannot view the file. The entry is simply removed from the directory so no other program or user can access it. du shows that it is gone -- it has walked the directory tree and the file is not listed. df shows that it is still there, as the file system knows that more is still using that space. Once you end the more session, du and df will agree.

Note that Soft Updates can delay the freeing of disk space; you might need to wait up to 30 seconds for the change to be visible!

This situation is common on web servers. Many people set up a FreeBSD web server and forget to rotate the log files. The access log fills up /var. The new administrator deletes the file, but the system still complains that the partition is full. Stopping and restarting the web server program would free the file, allowing the system to release the disk space. To prevent this from happening, set up newsyslog(8).

du就是通过搜索文件来计算每个文件的大小然后累加，du能看到的文件只是一些当前存在的，没有被删除的。他计算的大小就是当前他认为存在的所有文件大小的累加和。

df通过文件系统来快速获取空间大小的信息，当我们删除一个文件的时候，这个文件不是马上就在文件系统当中消失了，而是暂时消失了，当所有程序都不用时，才会根据OS的规则释放掉已经删除的文件， df记录的是通过文件系统获取到的文件的大小，他比du强的地方就是能够看到已经删除的文件，而且计算大小的时候，把这一部分的空间也加上了，更精确了。

当文件系统也确定删除了该文件后，这时候du与df就一致了。

下面在linux上面分别运行一下两个命令：

du - h

df - h

注意其中 -h的意思：human - readable  意思是以人类能够容易理解的格式输出

附图：

实践可知： df运行的非常之快，因为他只查文件系统索引，du运行非常慢，上面的截图是还没有运行结束，因为他需要实际走进每一个文件，提取每一个的大小