Re: [ILUG-BOM] Really Strange...

On Mon, 21 Jan 2002, Linux Lover wrote:

due to my carelessness my system's /var showed 100% usage..

I deleted some old log files and freed about 1 gb of disk space..

Simply deleting the logs won't help. Log files are kept open by programs that write to them, and these programs maintain a file pointer to the current write position. Even if you delete the file, or delete its contents, the program still writes to the old position, which may be many megabytes off the start. All preceding bytes are filled with null. This is mentioned in the apache manual.

If you do delete the logs, you need to restart whichever process is writing to that log. For apache, issue a SIGHUP, similarly for others, but check.