[olug] Reduce Directory Size

[Jon H. Larsen]

Howdy,

I discovered this morning that my /var/log directory had grown to 18 Meg, 
mostly due to many thousands of mgetty.log.ttyS0.* entries.  I found a 
great perl script to clean out the files, but now I'm left with a rather 
large directory structure that I would like to reduce in size.

Here is what the directory looks like:

drwxr-xr-x    6 root     root     19300352 May 19 09:13 log

Here is where I found the perl script to help clean the dir:

http://rattler.cajuninc.com/pipermail/pbml/2003-February/000095.html

One way I thought about was to drop to runlevel 1, make sure the 
syslog daemon isn't running, move /var/log/ to /var/oldlog, create a new 
/var/log folder, and move the proper files back from /var/oldlog and go 
back to runlevel 3.

Is there another way to do this? Will running e2fsck on the filesystem 
reduce the directory size?  Is there a switch that is used?

Any way to tell mgetty to stop all the logging?

This box is headless, with Serial Console enabled.

Jon L.



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