I ran into this one again today. If a file is open when deleted, it will not appear in a directory listing, but will take up space.

# df -h .
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
                      72G   58G   11G  86% /
# cat - >>large-file &
[1] 8958
# lsof large-file
COMMAND  PID USER   FD   TYPE DEVICE       SIZE    NODE NAME
cat     8958 root    1w   REG  253,0 5120000000 4300883 large-file
# rm -f large-file
# lsof | grep large-file
cat       8958      root    1w      REG      253,0 5120000000    4300883 /root/large-file (deleted)
# df -h .
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
                      72G   58G   11G  86% /
# kill -9 8958
# df -h .
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
                      72G   53G   15G  79% /
[1]+  Killed                  cat - >>large-file

uuencode/uudecode on RHEL (CentOS)

Earlier today I was looking to use uuencode on my RHEL host. Unfortunately, yum did not help:

# yum search uuencode
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
Setting up repositories
base                      100% |=========================| 1.1 kB    00:00
updates                   100% |=========================|  951 B    00:00
addons                    100% |=========================|  951 B    00:00
extras                    100% |=========================| 1.1 kB    00:00
Reading repository metadata in from local files
No Matches found

Furthermore, I struggled to find the correct search terms for Google to provide me with an answer. The correct package is “sharutils.” Anyways, for good measure, here is a quick demo of uuencode/uudecode:

$ echo "BASH Cures Cancer" > test.txt
$ zip test.zip test.txt
  adding: test.txt (stored 0%)
$ uuencode < test.zip -
begin 664 -
M4$L#!`H``````-%9=3@7HDD\$@```!(````(`!4`=&5S="YT>'155`D``^G>
MXT?IWN-'57@$`/0!]`%"05-(($-U<F5S($-A;F-E<@I02P$"%P,*``````#1
M674X%Z))/!(````2````"``-```````!````M($`````=&5S="YT>'155`4`
?`^G>XT=5>```4$L%!@`````!``$`0P```$T`````````
`
end
$ uuencode < test.zip - | uudecode > test2.zip
$ unzip test2.zip
Archive:  test2.zip
replace test.txt? [y]es, [n]o, [A]ll, [N]one, [r]ename: y
 extracting: test.txt
$ cat test.txt
BASH Cures Cancer

From the manual: “Uuencode reads file (or by default the standard input) and writes an encoded version to the standard output.  The encoding uses only printing ASCII characters and includes the mode of the file and the operand name for use by uudecode. “