Why is space not being freed from disk after deleting a file in Red Hat Enterprise Linux? When deleting a large file or files, the file is deleted successfully but the size of the filesystem does not reflect the change. I've deleted some files but the amount of free space on the filesystem has not changed. The OS was holding several very large log files open with some as large as ~30G. The file was previously deleted, but only stopping and restarting the jvm/java process released the disk space. The lsof command shows the following output before restarting the java process COMMAND  PID  USER FD  TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF  NODE NAME : java  49097 awdmw 77w  REG  253,6 33955068440 1283397 /opt/jboss/jboss-eap-5/jboss-as/server/all/log/server.log (deleted) When you perform a df, the storage shows 90+% utilized, however, there is not really that much written to that space.