Verified diagnostic signature
The filesystem may have free bytes but cannot allocate another inode or directory entry.
Match output from filesystem, understand the likely cause, then continue with sourced, read-only checks.
- Confidence
- high
- Platforms
- linux · macos
- Verified
- 2026-07-24
Recognized output
Signature matched locally
cannot create.*No space leftOneLiners matches this pattern in your browser. Your pasted output is not stored or indexed.
Likely causes
What usually produces this signal
- Inode exhaustion
- A directory containing very many small files
- Inode quota reached
Safe next checks
Collect evidence before changing the system
Show filesystem inode usage
df -iThe output matches the expected target and exits without an error.
Rank directories by the number of files they contain
find <path> -xdev -type f -printf '%h\n' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -<count>The output matches the expected target and exits without an error.