Remove unwanted packages and files

[jaiganeshmca]

Hello,

There are lot of files and folders which is eating up the disk space and looking at them all of them are important files.

What files/folders should i delete to to reclaim my disk space? (Which means if i delete these files, there is no harm to the server like /tmp, /var/log directory etc.. not sure which files to clear)

Any advise would be helpful.

[peter]

Unless you use your logs in some script you can compress the files in /var/log very easily by adding the compress option to the /etc/logrotate.conf file. The dateext option will also add the date on which the log was compressed to the filename.

compress
dateext

You can reduce the number of copies of log files by changing the rotation frequency. In this case 7 days are being kept.

rotate 7
daily

To activate the changes immediately run the command

logrotate -f /etc/logrotate.conf

[beezlebubsbum]

what about downloaded packages? I know that apt-get caches files that you have downloaded and installed, and deleting those might save you some space. I don't know where its actually stored though...

[hysterik]

what about downloaded packages? I know that apt-get caches files that you have downloaded and installed, and deleting those might save you some space. I don't know where its actually stored though...

apt-get clean

or if on Red Hat, "yum clean all".

Also, "rm -f /var/log/*.[0-9]*" should be safe to run. The OP should use visit the directories /var, /usr, etc. and run "du -sk *" to determine what is taking up the most space. I wouldn't worry about /tmp. Unless the system is having some significant uptime, that gets flushed.