In the spirit of "Ignorance is the path to wisdom" please bear with me.
Discovering the ambiguities in certain file size accountings under Unix/Linux (re: earlier post where du and ls gave vastly different results for both /var/log/lastlog and /var/log/faillog) led me to inspect /var more closely. There seemed to be no ambiguity in the following: # du -h /var/lib/dpkg 5.0M /var/lib/dpkg/info 1.0k /var/lib/dpkg/updates 56k /var/lib/dpkg/alternatives 5.0k /var/lib/dpkg/methods/disk/www 8.0k /var/lib/dpkg/methods/disk 2.0k /var/lib/dpkg/methods/floppy 1.0k /var/lib/dpkg/methods/mnt 2.0k /var/lib/dpkg/methods/multicd 2.0k /var/lib/dpkg/methods/mountable 1.0k /var/lib/dpkg/methods/ftp 17k /var/lib/dpkg/methods 15M /var/lib/dpkg I am currently using apt-get and dpkg extensively to build and maintain a workable Potato distro on a box with a smallish HDD (814 Mb). That 15M in /var/lib/dpkg seemed chunky to me. So I did du -k /var/lib/dpkg and got: total 10762 drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 1024 May 17 07:40 . drwxr-xr-x 27 root root 1024 May 7 17:51 .. drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 1024 May 15 22:12 alternatives -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3518844 May 17 03:04 available -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3518844 May 17 03:03 available-old -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8 May 17 02:47 cmethopt -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2128 May 17 03:02 diversions -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2020 May 17 03:02 diversions-old drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 65536 May 17 03:03 info -rw-r----- 1 root root 0 May 17 03:03 lock -rw-rw---- 1 root root 0 May 17 02:47 methlock drwxr-xr-x 8 root root 1024 Apr 5 02:36 methods -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1129 Apr 13 06:19 predep-package -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 870741 May 17 03:04 status -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 870740 May 17 03:03 status-old -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 870741 May 17 03:04 status.yesterday.0 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 207236 May 15 23:59 status.yesterday.1.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 206679 May 14 01:42 status.yesterday.2.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 205638 May 13 20:57 status.yesterday.3.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 205079 May 7 17:53 status.yesterday.4.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 204288 May 7 01:03 status.yesterday.5.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 203151 May 5 13:18 status.yesterday.6.gz drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 1024 May 17 03:04 updates Does dpkg need all that status history? And if not, must I monitor it myself, or does dpkg have a self-cleansing method that is somehow not being invoked here? This may seem a small problem to some, but it grows in inverse proportion to the size of ones hard disk. I use 'apt-get clean' regularly to keep the overhead down, but I haven't found, or knew that I'd found, anything similar in the dpkg manual page. I hesitate to write a cron job to trim these status files on new processes I'm still in the early stages of learning. Thanks for whatever guidance you can give, and for your patience. montefin
