out of space on /root

[Xen]

Bob schreef op 06-03-2017 7:33:
> Using Ubuntu 16.10.  The system ran out of space on /root.  I found 
> that
> /var/log/syslog was 27gb in size.  I deleted all the syslog.* files and 
> got the
> system sort of working and copied /var/log/syslog to my home directory 
> (/home
> is on a different partition than /root).  I then deleted the syslog 
> file and
> rebooted.  Now things are working OK.  I would like to find out what 
> caused
> this problem but can not look at the syslog file as it is too large.  
> Any ideas
> on how to display this file?

In general commands such as:

cat "file" | tail -n 500

will get you the last 500 lines.

You can make that 500 figure as large as you want.

Maybe with a file so large a better command would be

tail -n 500 "file" so that tail can do random seeks, but I'm not sure.


The above command will read the entire file from disk before tail will 
filter out the last 500 lines.

What you can easily do is to use the "split" command to first reduce it 
into smaller bits.

The idiomatic expression:


cat "file" | split -b 500M

would do the trick, although again, you can better directly name a file:


split -b 500M "filename".

Both should work (tail and split with a direct filename). If you use 
split, you will need the same amount of space you are already using.