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df command and mounts

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Hi,
if I use the df command on my debian installation I get the following:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 250M 249M 0 100% /
tmpfs 252M 8.0K 252M 1% /dev/shm
/dev/sda11 5.5G 3.9G 1.4G 75% /home
/dev/sda12 5.5G 1.4G 3.9G 26% /opt
/dev/sda10 4.6G 33M 4.4G 1% /srv
/dev/sda8 361M 8.3M 333M 3% /tmp
/dev/sda5 4.6G 2.4G 2.0G 55% /usr
/dev/sda9 9.2G 6.6G 2.2G 76% /usr/local
/dev/sda6 2.8G 690M 2.0G 26% /var
/dev/sdb1 5.5G 2.6G 2.7G 49% /backup1
/dev/sdb2 5.5G 1.8G 3.5G 33% /backup2
/dev/sdb3 5.9G 2.0G 3.6G 36% /backup3
tmpfs 10M 48K 10M 1% /dev

what I'm concerned about is the first line telling me that the root partition '/' is 100% used, yet the other percentages seem to contradict this.
Am I interpreting this correctly?
Thanks.

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The parition "/" is bound to is really full

Submitted by georgos on Fri, 2006-09-29 08:39.

Hi there

You need to differentiate between the file system tree and partitions from which this tree is made up.

"/" (root) is bound to the partition /dev/sda1 and this parition is actually full.
That doesn't mean that you're in trouble though, because all subdirectories where data needs to be written into when running have other partitions bound to them (like /tmp or /var or /home). Those partitions are not full.

"/" is not the summary of all free disk space. It really only shows the free space of the partition "/" has been bound to.

Because rarely anything is written into other directories than those you have mounted on separate partitions, the partition that has root bound to will not be filled up any further. Only if data is written to a location not managed by your separate partitions, the partition responsible for root will get the data (i.e. no other partition is repsonible for the subtree you wrote the data into, so the root partition is the last but ultimate partiton available).

I hope that clarified it.
Cheers, Georg

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