var very full

On Sunday 08 October 2006 09:06, radhika wrote:
> Hi,
> I am running netbsd 3.0 on i386.
> I  notice var is almost 50% of my 14G.
> In var I noticed a backups directory with etc, and var
in it.
> What is the backups being used for?
> How can I clean up var ie. remove old files without
breaking anything.
>
> thanks,
> Radhika

/var/backups is used by /etc/security (see security.conf(5))
for more details.  
Basically, it's used to keep copies of vital files if they
have changed.  
This should not be that large and I personally do not
recommend deleting it.  
Especially considering we're talking about a 14G drive here
and not something 
smaller than a gig where the few megs you would recover
would really matter.

You can try cleaning up /var/tmp  with
find /var/tmp -atime +3 -exec rm {} ;

That will delete any files not access within three days. 
You can also delete 
old log files (those with .gz in /var/logs) that you don't
need anymore.

But the big thing is to locate where the space is going, 
Try "du -k | 
sort -rn | head" for a good idea of where you should be
looking.  The larger 
the directory or file the more you should look closely at it
and see what's 
happening.  Once you know what is taking up the space, you
will have a better 
idea of how to fix it and possibly prevent it from
recurring.

-Kevin

On Sun, Oct 08, 2006 at 03:30:41PM -0400, Kevin Brunelle
wrote:
> Once you know what is taking up the space, you will
have a better 
> idea of how to fix it and possibly prevent it from
recurring.

Just remember that deleting a large log file won't recover
the space
if the program still has it open - all it does is make the
file
harder to locate.
Truncating the file will recover the space, and can be done
easily using
    $ : >filename
from most shells.

	David

-- 
David Laight: davidl8s.co.uk