I've noticed as I've checked root's e-mail over the past two weeks or so that my partition size is listed at 15 GB. About two weeks ago, the used space was 1.9 GB and the free space was 13.0 GB. OK, maybe just some rounding/precision errors? Now I'm at 2.1 used and 12.0 free. What? That doesn't make much sense.

I'm running FC1, 2.4.22-1.2174.nptl. Dell Latitude C600 laptop. I have dual boot set up for Win98SE, though GRUB shows an older kernel version as an additional boot option (3 total).

Yes, there are other posts similar to this one. However, I have had a gradually bleeding of space, it didn't just up and disappear at once, so I thought it might warrant its own thread.


Thanks for any help.

That sounds like it would be your logs growing and with a dual boot I doubt that the machine is on when cron daily/weekly/monthly should be run to rotate then delete them you should look into installing anacron which will check to see if cron has been run at the proper time and if not will run it.

Does rm <file> completely wipe the file from the HD or does it just remove the reference to the file? If it just removes the reference, this could be my problem. I have done a fair bit of rm-ing so maybe that is the issue? If so, how do I wipe the files from the HD, I have heard there are programs that do it automatically? Thanks.

rm doesn't zero out the contents of a file, but deleting files will make the space available. I believe that happy tux is correct. You might want to look in the /var/logs area. If you see logs that end in a number plus the extension .gz, these are the old logs. After a log gets to big, It is split up and the older parts are compressed and given a number. The oldest previous split is deleted at this point.
If you have never left you computer on after midnight, than this doesn't happen and the logs could be getting too long. If it has been happening, you can delete the recent backup old logs manually.
These logs can get to be very long, especially if ipchains is being logged.

HappyTux's idea is a good one. There are other things that the system is scheduled to do daily late at night. Such as index the files on the computer. The command 'locate' depends on this file. Another is to check file permissions for security problems, although this one may be done hourly (msec on a Mandrake system).

The unix system was designed for main and mid frame computers, that would be left on all of the time. The anacron program that HappyTux mentioned will start programs that where not run when the computer was turned off.

Might this be a weekly cron issue? Because I have been up for nearly 7 days (the system, not me personally, and, as a general rule, I typically leave my system running unless it hangs, crashes, etc.) and I still am seeing this gap in space.

Also, when I run anacron, should I see a printed output in the shell? I typed anacron, and I got shot right back to a prompt. Then I did a man anacron, didn't help me out too much. I'll run anacron again, though, now.

Could you give me a little more info about security issues with files that you referred to? Or was it file permissions? I don't remember which. Thanks for your help though.

I just checked under /var/log and there were many files that had multiple instances (i.e. secure, secure.1, secure.2, etc. and rpmpkgs, rpmpkgs.1, etc.) Thanks again.