OpenBSD 3.4

Sigkill(9) · 10-11-2005, 11:22 AM

Total newbie question.

I have an OpenBSD 3.4 machine running spamd and logging to /var/log/spamd

The file is 1.9G

Can I just blow it away?

Or maybe echo "" > /var/log/spamd

Will killing logfiles like this have any adverse effects?

MensaWater · 10-11-2005, 11:39 AM

Try running lsof against the file. If no processes have it open its probably safe to overwrite it. If something DOES have it open you should probably stop whatever that is, then do the blow away, then restart the process. Removing an open file only removes the name - the inode stays there until the process goes away so the space doesn't get freed. Doing the redirect in while its running may prevent this problem but I'd prefer to have my process start up cleanly against the file to take no chances.

Sigkill(9) · 10-11-2005, 01:23 PM

lsof is not on this machine.

so I used fstat and grep'd for the file inode

server# ll -i spamd

643576 -rwxrwxrwx 1 root wheel 2089565687 Sep 15 16:57 spamd

server# fstat | grep 643576

_syslogd syslogd 9848 19 / 643576 -rwxrwxrwx w 2089565687