>>> I once had a rather funny problem on my computer at home. / is a small
>>> partition that inadvertantly got filled while a crontab moved some
>>> logfiles around. However, when I attempted to fix the problem by removing
>>> the old log files, df / would give free disk space on / for only a few
>>> seconds before it was filled up totally again! No process was holding
>>> anything open, I'm sure of that.
> Are you using process accounting? If something goes wrong with that,
> /var/account/pacct grow at disk I/O speed until /var is filled.
> Once restarting pacct helped, but another time I had to reboot (or to live
> without pacct).
It was indeed that directory. however, after removing all files and
stopping pacct space still wouldn't return, instead just kept filling
up more and more...