Re: safelly erasing dirs/files

On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 2:37 AM, Jasen Betts <jasen@xnet.co.nz> wrote:
> On 2009-11-14, Joao Ferreira gmail <joao.miguel.c.ferreira@gmail.com> wrote:
>> ok. thx all for the explanation
>>
>> my problem is I a heavilly bloated pg database that has just filled up
>> the partition
>>
>> data is in /var/pgsql/.. and /var is 100% full...
>>
>> vacuum/reindex is saying: I can't do it cause I have no space :(
>>
>> how do I un-bloat the /var partition ? this is why I was considering
>> rm !!!!
>
> If ubuntu or debian  /var/cache/apt/archives/* can safely be removed
> and will often free up a lot of space, (or on redhat
> /var/cache/yum/*/packages/*)
>
> If you installed from source you may have several daily log files you
> can remove, redhat seems also to keep the logs around
> thse files are often found in /var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_log and should
> contain ascii text. Debian and ubuntu put them in /var/log/postgres
> and use logrotate to trim them, but there maybe other files in /var/log
> that can be truncated or erased to free up space.

Also note that if you're on ext2/ext3 and your partitions were set up
with some amount of reserved space for root you can free up some space
for a minute by using tune2fs:

sudo tune2fs -m 0 /dev/sda1

then turn it back to reserved when you're done:

sudo tune2fs -m 2 /dev/sda1