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shrinking hard disk space

Hi, about 4 weeks ago I had a good 7 gigs of space available on my ext partition, but just the other day I tried to login and it gave me an error saying that my hard disk was full. Now, I've barely used linux for much, mostly the internet and writing/compiling tiny amounts of code (executable files are no more than 10K).
I was forced to delete a whole bunch of files as well as uninstall big programs like beryl so that I'd have more disk space, and managed to get it up to 290 MB. But in the past 30 minutes its already shrunk to 260MB and all I've actually done is use the internet.

Anybody know of some way I can check whats eating up my hard disk space?

well in a properly partitioned system only one specific partition is atually going to run out of space.. what does "df -h" say about what partitions are using how much space?

df -h says:

Code:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00

                      14G  13G  284M  98% /

/dev/hda2              99M  17M  77M  18% /boot

tmpfs                500M    0  500M  0% /dev/shm

/dev/hda4              27G  25G  1.6G  94% /mnt/EXTRA

Did you check the size of files from /var/log?

yeah log files are usually a good culprit. but run "du -h --max-depth=1 /" and that'll show the size of all first level directories which is a good start. if /var looks like the culprit, then change / to /var in the command above and repeat...

Hey, thanks for the help! I ran "du -h --max-depth=1 /" and actually narrowed it down to my /var/lib/mlocate being 6.6 Gigs.

Anyone know how much of it is safe to get rid of?

wow, that's pretty obscure... never seen mlocate use it all up. what's actually in there? (ls -l /var/lib/mlocate) all that should be is an index of files on your system for quick searching... no more than a few meg in just one file at most really... i'd be pretty confiduent you can just nuke it all and run "updatedb" to recreate the valid data, but i'd not think it's wouldn't keep getting worse again...

Heres what I get:

Code:

ls -l /var/lib/mlocate

total 7045360

-rw-r----- 1 root slocate  3708072 Mar 16 12:45 mlocate.db

-rw------- 1 root root    272687104 Nov 20  2007 mlocate.db.0jCZRc

-rw------- 1 root root    146665472 Apr  4 21:38 mlocate.db.4FGoOi

-rw------- 1 root root    146657280 Apr 11 19:55 mlocate.db.4YKTlZ

-rw------- 1 root root    146657280 Nov 28  2007 mlocate.db.77CiGA

-rw------- 1 root root      6893568 Nov 20  2007 mlocate.db.9beJUI

-rw------- 1 root root    146657280 Mar 30 15:49 mlocate.db.Dt6sjX

-rw------- 1 root root    146657280 Mar 29 15:13 mlocate.db.e7kp1I

-rw------- 1 root root    146665472 Apr  9 21:46 mlocate.db.E8rqmY

-rw------- 1 root root    146665472 Apr 12 20:02 mlocate.db.eKJIYo

-rw------- 1 root root    782368768 Nov 22  2007 mlocate.db.foJ5Qf

-rw------- 1 root root    146644992 Apr  1 14:25 mlocate.db.fw1Qx9

-rw------- 1 root root    146657280 Nov 28  2007 mlocate.db.GhDZmO

-rw------- 1 root root      6893568 Nov 19  2007 mlocate.db.hFabJp

-rw------- 1 root root    782372864 Nov 19  2007 mlocate.db.k3AkVh

-rw------- 1 root root    146665472 Nov 26  2007 mlocate.db.nAlpZA

-rw------- 1 root root    146681856 Apr 13 15:45 mlocate.db.PuoUBx

-rw------- 1 root root      6914048 Mar 18 14:28 mlocate.db.qe98W3

-rw------- 1 root root    392331264 Nov 23  2007 mlocate.db.qThsip

-rw------- 1 root root    146665472 Mar 31 00:31 mlocate.db.RORLsb

-rw------- 1 root root    146653184 Apr 14 15:42 mlocate.db.RzLNXd

-rw------- 1 root root    471662592 Nov 20  2007 mlocate.db.sFT2QS

-rw------- 1 root root    146669568 Nov 26  2007 mlocate.db.SkUJWr

-rw------- 1 root root    150114304 Nov 25  2007 mlocate.db.T8ltU4

-rw------- 1 root root    146653184 Nov 27  2007 mlocate.db.tlus1S

-rw------- 1 root root    146644992 Apr  2 19:10 mlocate.db.u1m2UF

-rw------- 1 root root    146665472 Apr 10 23:53 mlocate.db.u71GlH

-rw------- 1 root root    902033408 Nov 21  2007 mlocate.db.UaF7NC

-rw------- 1 root root      6893568 Nov 20  2007 mlocate.db.uqXy0d

-rw------- 1 root root    146657280 Apr 10 01:43 mlocate.db.vlfIFc

-rw------- 1 root root    782372864 Nov 21  2007 mlocate.db.z8xH9a

I think I'll just get rid of them all (except maybe mlocate.db).

yeah do that, but you have files there that were created next november...! may well be a reason for that if it's doing some sort of age check, which locate itself does - it'll warn you if it's older than 8 days. wonder what it'd think if the file it's checking apparently isn't going to exist for another 7 months...

Ok, thank you very much! I know have 7.1 gigs of free space! However, mlocate looks like its already repopulating but at least so far the one file it created was from today, and not from later on this year.
Thanks again!

I wonder if a weak cmos battery is throwing the hardware clock off.