hello list I wanted to delete some unnecessary data from one of my systems (running SuSE 9.2) so I decided to do "du -h" on whole /. filesystem and check which directories are free_space_eaters. I redirected output to file because I did it remotely and didn't wanted to watch all those filenames running in front of mu eyes. HDD in machine is an 40GB ATA and it took about 30 minutes (I haven't counted) to complete calculating occupied space. generated file was about 5.7MB big. so I didn't want to edit it and I did just tail on it... and I couldn't belive: ---- snip ----- 2.2G ./export/home 2.2G ./export 2.1T . WHOLE 2.1 TeraBytes on my 40GB HDD :-) amazing :) so I got curious what's messed up and decided to load file with vi and did some searching in it /T\t and I found this line 2.1T ./var/cache/man/opt OK, let's go there: #cd /var/cache/man/opt #du -h ----snip---- 0 ./cat1 0 ./cat2 0 ./cat3 0 ./cat4 0 ./cat5 0 ./cat6 0 ./cat7 0 ./cat8 0 ./cat9 0 ./catn 2.1T . all subdirs were 0 counted #ls -la --- snip --- directories going here ----- -rw-r--r-- 1 man 31370 2005-03-07 04:15 index.db -rw-r--r-- 1 root 0 2004-11-24 04:16 whatis #du -h index.db 32K index.db ok, let's check other one: #du -h whatis 2.0T whatis so... "whatis" messed up my counters :) well, that machine was an SuSE Frankenstein that's being upgraded each time new version comes out since 7.x now, I checked my home 9.2 fresh installed and there was no whatis file in directory ok, have various versions at work so I'm sshing/telnetting to them to check their status regarding strange terabytes... 7.1 nothing. 8.1 nothing.. 8.2 nothing... 9.0 nothing.... 9.1 nothing..... another 9.2 nothing and I'm giving up finally cheers Aidin