On Saturday 11 March 2006 06:52, Charles wrote: >I've noticed that I have files piling up in /var/cache, /var/log, and >/var/lib. These three folders now have 100 mb of files in them. > > >Which of these must be present for the machine to run? This is (at > the moment) a home machine; I don't *need* the log files, but I > don't know what happens if I just delete the files in these three > directories.
That will eat your lunch. If logrotate is properly setup, those files will not grow beyond what they are as the old ones will be expunged when they are no longer of forensic value, typically 5 weeks total lifetime. /var/cache is the only one that will grow because your package manager typically keeps a copy of what it has downloaded and upgraded in its original download form. Your package manager should have a command to flush that if your /var is getting close to capacity. With disc space a commodity thing, a 500 meg /var partition is unimaginable today, my /var/cache alone is 1,273,796 whatevers in du's default format. Which is not a big deal since /var is on /dev/hdd, a 15GB partition on a 200GB drive. 4GB swap is there, and the rest is amanda vtapes for backups. This does point out one given, that /var is not on the main drive, so I stand a little better chance of having some forensics available should the main drive upchuck and go read-only on me, which did happen once long ago. -- Cheers, Gene People having trouble with vz bouncing email to me should add the word 'online' between the 'verizon', and the dot which bypasses vz's stupid bounce rules. I do use spamassassin too. :-) Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above message by Gene Heskett are: Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
