out of space on /root

[Joel Rees]

Ah, yes, this conversation recalls me the days when cat was a shell built-in.

Now, I, personally, would tend to use less, and "g" and "G", or vim,
and "gg" and "G". And the cursor keys.

On Tue, Mar 7, 2017 at 5:17 AM, Bob <ubuntu-qygzanxc at listemail.net> wrote:
> ** Reply to message from Xen <list at xenhideout.nl> on Mon, 06 Mar 2017 07:53:00
> +0100
>
>> 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.
>
> Thanks to all that replied, that was a very interesting discussion.
>
>
>
> After reading the man page I did a
>
> split -C 250M -d syslog
>
> I thought 500M was too large and I was right.  Even at 250M the file took about
> a minute to read and was very slow trying to page very far.  Now that I have
> looked at the file I could have used "head -n 200" to get the start and "tail
> -n 5000" to get the end.  The entire rest of the 27gb of syslog was
>
> Mar   5 17:26:55 Jupiter nautilus-autostart.desktop[3036]:
> H#033[1:1H#033[1:1H#033[1:1H#033[1:1H#033[1:1H#033[1:1H#033[1:1H#033[1:1H#033
>
> etc, each line is a little over 3kb.  These time stamps start about 11am and
> ends when the system runs out of space at about 5:30pm.
>
> I do not know much about Ubuntu but looking at the syslog the first 133 lines
> look like normal log entries.  The next 5 lines are garbage and is about 13kb
> long.
>
> So my guess is that the log entry that would show the problem has been
> overlayed and I will never know what caused the problem.  I will just hope that
> it does not happen again.
>
> --
> Robert Blair
>
>
> The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.  -- Mark Twain
>
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-- 
Joel Rees

I'm imagining I'm a novelist:
http://joel-rees-economics.blogspot.com/2017/01/soc500-00-00-toc.html
More of my delusions:
http://reiisi.blogspot.jp/p/novels-i-am-writing.html