Clearing (but not deleting) log files
Sometimes, as a Systems Administrator, or SysAdmin, there are times we need to clear out the log files, without actually deleting them. As a smart Sys Admin, you normally wouldn’t need to do this, but as I am currently involved in supporting customers and their Linux machines, I run into some pretty neat stuff (neat as in special). I’ve had a few issues where someone actually runs out of disk space on / (root filesystem) due to the /var/log directory being full.
First off, you might run the df command only to realize that, maybe, you have used 97% of the partition up, in this case / (root filesystem). More times than not, this is usually due to your /var/log directory. Make sure though, I’m presuming that you already know that your /var/log directory is full. To find out what is taking up the most space (you should already know why, and thus you are viewing this possibly because you are having issues with a full filesystem), you would need to run the df command. Continue reading Clearing (but not deleting) log files