alan secker

When vmware wouldn't start a guest, I checked the var partition. As I
expected, it was full, I looked for a suspect log file and found a 3.6GB
mythtvbackend log. I'm not using MythTV at present so I deleted it. It
didn't help. /var is still full. Is there a command that will tell me the
(say) 10 largest files within the directory/subdirectories, including
hidden ones?

alan secker

While I would still like a solution to my question, I ought to add that
since posting my first message, I closed down and rebooted, to find that I
now had 5.3GB in /var. I thought re-booting was unnecessary under Linux?

david w. hodgins

kdirstat is a very usefull program for finding large files, or directories
with lots of small files. For command line, try "du -ab|sort -g".

The reboot must have shut down a process with a large file in /var/tmp, or
similar location. Stopping whatever the process was, would have had the
same effect, without rebooting.

One thing to be aware of, is truly hidden files. For example, I use a seperate
file system for /var/log, which is normally auto mounted, at boot time. If,
for some reason, the mount fails, the logs will be written in the /var/log
directory, which will be in whichever filesystem /var is in. I then fix
the problem that stopped /var/log from mounting, and reboot. Once the directory
/var/log gets used as a mount point, all of the files that were written to it,
will be inaccessible, but still taking up space. The only way to delete those
files, is to unmount the filesystem first.

Regards, Dave Hodgins

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bill mullen

Try this:

du -xab | sort -nr | head -n10

Note that this will list directories as well as individual files. A nice
X-based app to let you see this sort of thing visually is "fsv"; you'd
need to run it as root (using sudo from a user terminal, presumably) in
order to be able to use it to examine the contents of /var. Like so:

$ sudo urpmi fsv
$ sudo fsv /var

You mentioned that you were "not using MythTV at present", but was the
mythtvbackend service running? If so, then despite the fact that you had
deleted the log file, the mythtvbackend daemon would have still had it
open, so the disk space it was using was not released until the reboot
(which stopped that service, along with all other ones). Stopping just
the mythtvbackend service, before or after deleting the log file, would
have accomplished the same thing without a reboot.

HTH!

--
Bill Mullen
RLU #270075

unruh

Alan Secker <alan@asandco.co.uk> writes:


Something has the file open. A file disappears ONLY when all programs that
have the file open either close it or the program quits. Find out which
program is using the file and shut down that program.

Apparently you are using mythTV at the moment.

(If you cannot find the file, shutdown the computer. That will stop the
program for sure. )

unruh

Alan Secker <alan@asandco.co.uk> writes:

It is. But it is a guarenteed way of stopping the program that had the file
open. Easier is to close the program itself.
..

alan secker

Yes I spotted that as soon as I saw the file. I disabled that (and one or
two other unwanted items as well)!

alan secker

I'm not using MythTV as the set-up drives me mad. I'm usoing Kaffiene which
wasa trouble free. You are quite right of course.

Thank you and everyone else who has been so helpful.

Regards, Alan Secker