runaway file?

misophist · 03-08-2009, 07:50 PM

I'm running opensuse 11.0 with / on a 20 gig partition which, until recently, was about 50% full. Suddenly the usage has gone up to 95.5%. I suspect a process has created some huge file or files but don't know how to look for it/them. Any advice?

There ate 3 usb drives mounted in /media. They don't seem to be involved.

Drakeo · 03-08-2009, 08:33 PM

this happend to me once with a faulty cdrom drive the door was stuck or something and it created this huge /etc/var/log/syslog . open a terminal and type as root dmesg see what the error out put is and type as root tail -f /var/log/syslog and look at the read out. another thing on open suse if you have had to crash the system to reboot it will make about a 80mb core crash not sure if they are still doing that though. that would be in root called core. if you did that 10 times that is 800 MB

misophist · 03-08-2009, 10:24 PM

The syslog files you mention don't exist in opensuse. I couldn't find any error messages in dmesg.

Drakeo · 03-08-2009, 10:51 PM

trust me every linux systems have a /var/log/syslog good luck then may be some one will find a real fat file on your system and then you will figure it out.

Quote:

http://www.google.com/search?q=opens...ient=firefox-a

then type this ok tail -f /var/log/messages

misophist · 03-09-2009, 01:29 AM

/var/log/messages contains no obvious error messages. Is it the same as syslog? Kdirstat showed several oversized tar files in /tmp/kde-user but removing those only got me down to 89.1%. Still not good enough.

openSauce · 03-09-2009, 12:49 PM

du -sh /* will give you the size of each directory under / (execute with root privs so that you can read everything). Find one that's bigger than it should be and keep drilling down til you find the problem files.

Fedora's version of Gnome comes with a GUI tool called disk usage analyzer which is useful for this - it sorts each directory by size and displays the filesystem in a tree, with subtrees also sorted by size. Don't know if OpenSUSE would have an equivalent though.

jschiwal · 03-09-2009, 12:52 PM

Look at hidden files in your home directory. I've had ~/.xsession errors grow to a large size causing problems. An easy way to spot large files like this if you run konqueror is to use the File Size View. A 2gb file will stand right out. This will also let you find a directory with tons of small files such as ~/.thumbnails, ~/.picasa or /var/cache/beagle.