Extend a Linux partition

When the Linux disk drive is full, first we need to identify the reason for the drive overuse. Many times the drive is filled with one large log file, that can be identified and truncated.

To list the directory sizes under the current directory execute

du -sh *

To empty a file, overwrite it with nothing, so the process that writes into it still can access it.

cat /dev/null > ./MY_LARGE_LOG_FILE

When we free up the disk space, the server needs time to recover and do some housekeeping. The load average numbers show how busy the server was in the recent minutes. Check the load on the computer with

uptime

23:58:50 up 318 days, 16:32, 1 user, load average: 0.03, 5.34, 18.68

The load averages are from the past 1, 5, and 15 minutes

Grow the partition

If extra drive space is needed, enlarge the volume. We also need to grow the partition, so the operating system can access the additional space on the volume.

Grow the partition to use the entire volume. Use the growpart command, and specify the name of the volume and the partition number.

sudo growpart /dev/nvme0n1 1

If the file system is xfs, update the xfs file system metadata to use the entire partition

sudo xfs_growfs /

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