1 min to read
Emptying Large Logs
Don't just rm them
Say you’re on your Ubuntu instance and you do
df -h
and it tells you you’re all out space cause some processes developed a gigantic log in
/var/log/some_process.log
Don’t
rm /var/log/some_process.log
Do a
echo '' > /var/log/some_process.log
instead.
This helps you in 3 ways.
First the file never actually disappears so you won’t get ‘open file deletion’ problem.
Second if you were to instead delete the file the space won’t be freed up because the memory continues to be allocated to the process that’s writing to the file. If you examine the total disk space using:
df -h
it will look like you didn’t delete anything. Whereas checking with
du -h
will reveal it’s actually gone.
Thirdly the process that expects the file to be there won’t have to be restarted 🙃
