[Discuss] Root and /home Partitions filled

[Murray Strome]

I had turned off my computer while I was away, and when I rebooted it 
(using Mandriva), X-windows would not start.  I logged in from the 
console and tried to start X manually and it would not start.  After 
trying lots of other things, I did

df -k

and found that my partition mounted as "/" had no space available.  I 
looked through some things there and found a few files that I knew I 
could safely delete.  After I did this, I rebooted and X Windows started 
fine.  However,  I am not sure what had filled up my root partition, nor 
how to determine what it might be.   I did notice something peculiar 
when I was booting -- a whole bunch of references to unknown devices 
called "tape" went flying by -- these seemed to go up to the 600's. I 
think it said something about udev. 

With a cursory look at the root directory, I nothing stands out.

On my wife's computer this morning, I tried to send something to the 
Trash in (Thunderbird) E-mail. It said that there was not enough memory. 
With kf -k, I saw that /home was filled.  I looked around, and found 
that {HOME}/tmp had thousands of gs_* entries.  I deleted them all, and 
ended up with 38% free space. However, within minutes, this had gone 
down to 23%, and there were a whole bunch of new gs_* files in tmp. I 
then did

ps -e

The last couple of entries were related to ghostscript.  I stopped them, 
and checked again. Sure enough, a whole bunch of new entries in tmp had 
occurred. Also, ghostscript had two new processes. I then tried ps -e 
repeatedly. Each time, the old entries for ghostscript were gone, but 
two new ones had appeared.  I knew that the GIMP in particular used 
ghostscript. I closed all applications on the desktop (including GIMP 
2.3 which was running at the time) and deleted all the gs_* files 
again.  The freespace on /home seems to have stabilized at 23%.

Anyone know what is happening?  I think this all started after moving to 
Mandriva 2007 with GIMP 2.3, but am not certain.

Murray