Comment by xgbi

I had an interesting issue with that the other day:

Someone on my company thought it good to launch background process from within a cron, and start it with `&ˋ at the end, so that it detached from the cron and goes as child to init .

Right, but the program opens std out and dumps its output in it. Guess what, the fd handling the std out ends up in a temp file which is deleted by cron, but still held by the program.

I ended up with a full / in all production servers, with no culprit when running ˋdu`. Only running ˋlsof |grep deleted` did I find these huge temporary files.

Killing the process and switching to a saner systemd service was the savior.