/var messages are huge
 

My mandrake 2006 laptop crashed withing 2 days of running. It may not be the reason but df -h gave the / partition as being 100% full. On checking I found /var had grown to over 1.2 GB. Any way to cut down on the messages ? As a temp fix I did echo xyz > filename for the files that were huge. I hope this doesnt break the system.

Did you update the system? Maybe the update files is stored here. Do something like ' du -k | sort -n '. The command will list the diskuasge and sorts it from smallest to largest.

Just want to make sure since not really saying /var/spool/messages as contain all the data. var is just not all for messages.

Hope this helps.
Brian1

try tail /var/log/messages to see why your log files are so big. I had the problem because some process was generating alot of errors over and over

Yes I updated the system right after installation. The 3 biggest files were (~320MB each)
/var/log/messages
/var/log/syslog
/var/kernel/errors

Right now (after Brian1's command) the 2 (by far) biggest files are /var/lib/rpmi - 80MB
/var/lib/urpmi - 110MB

Not a mandriva user but others can confrim this but I think this is whre mandriva stores downlaoded rpm updates. Also you say they are files, I they are directories. Synaptic/Apt does the same to store downloaded rpms but uses /var/cache/apt.

If /var/log/messages and others is that large after 2 days then see whats in them. dmesg command will show most of that. Just to make sure you are seeing it correctly use the command ' ls -lha ' in /var/logs directory. The h makes the it more humanly readable. Default is bytes.


Brian1