Got a page on an error today:

Error, DISK_SPACE:/var – hostname – UNIX – EMAIL – 100% full, 0MB free, 722MB total

Did a quick ‘du’ on /var filesystem and found out the culprit directory:

# du -sk * | sort -rn | more
232013 preserve
222272 tmp
62607 sadm
58204 cfengine
44270 spool
40355 adm
510 cron
503 orca
343 apache

Apparently, /var/preserv is used a temporary place holder used to store vi or ex temporary data. So, doing a quick recursive listing (`ls -lR`) showed the date stamps of the files inside /var/preserve/users.

 # ls -aslt | more
total 176126
4 drwxrwxrwt  84 root     bin         1536 Dec 13 19:09 ..
2 drwx——   2      user group              512 Nov 21 07:44 .
192 -rw——-   1     user group        98304 Nov 21 07:44 Exaaa0000019883
64 -rw——-   1      user group          32768 Oct 27 03:40 Exaaa0000028082
170624 -rw—=  1    user group    87294772 Oct  9 21:24 Exaaa0000013066
64 -rw——-   1     user group      32768 Oct  8 21:53 Exaaa0000015814
72 -rw——-   1       user group         6864 Sep 28  2007 Exaaa0000026859

One more ‘du’ to find out which one takes the most space, and I’ll start deleting there:

# du -sk * | sort -rn| more
88061   user1
19338   user2
19225   user3
12653   user4
11881   user5
8685    user6
7649    user7

Surprisingly *grin*,  user1 take the most space.. so it’s bye bye to those temporary files..

#cd /var/preserve/user1/
# ls -last
# rm Exa*