Error: no space left on device Ubuntu 16.04

Solution 1:

you may want to check your inode usage as well:

df -i

it's possible to get "no space left on device" when you have space available, but you're out of inodes.

http://web.archive.org/web/20210514092503/https://scoutapm.com/blog/understanding-disk-inodes

Solution 2:

I faced a similar problem. In my case after login in, the screen would not show icons and only the cursor. Even auto completion in bash-terminal threw an error of out-of-memory.

I tried unmounting /tmp, apt-get autoclean, apt-get clean nothing worked.

In my case deleting large files in ~/.cache worked.

cd ~/.cache
du -sh *
rm -fr <large files/folders>

Generally, deleting files in .cache is not harmful but still be careful. In my case thumbnails and pip folders were the culprit taking 1G and 3.6G respectively.

Solution 3:

Run df -h and see if there are any folders that are 100% full. Looks like /tmp may be full.