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Neil Winchurst wrote: > A little while ago I asked a quesion about the room left on my root > partition and received some help. I have done some further research > since. Unfortunately that has left me more confused than before. > > To recap, here is the output from df > > Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted > /dev/sda1 5.8G 4.5G 1.1G 82% / > /dev/sda6 140G 5.0G 135G 4% /home > [neil@localhost ~]$ > > As you can see, root is getting a bit full. > > The partitions were set up for me when I installed Mandriva2006. I let > the program do it since I do not understand much about what I should be > doing with partitions. > > I have always assumed that root would remain about the same size that > it started at and that any increase in disk usage would appear only > the sda6 partition, which has lots of space. Is this the case? > > I work in my home directory of course (/home/neil). In May I bought a > digital camera so there are now lots of photos in /home/neil/photos. > But I suppose that all that increase in usage will be on sda6. > > I have never downloaded any graphics, videos, films or music from the > internet. I have installed a few programs but they are not very big. > > Even so, over the last few weeks the disk usage on root has increased > from about 79% to the current 82%. It seems to have steadied down at > the moment, but I feel that I am liable to run out of space in the root > partition long before I have filled up anywhere near the free 135Gb on > sda6. > > What causes the root partition to increase in size? > > Why didn't the installation program make root much bigger if necessary, > say 30 or 40Gb? There is plenty of room on the disk. > > Should I be concerned about this, or am I completely misunderstanding > how it all works? > > I suggest that any helpful answers to this would be useful to many > other members of the lug also. > > TIA > > Neil Winchurst Since you state that you're not in the habit of installing lots of applications, the only thing I can think of that would reasonably use up space like this would be your logs. If I remember correctly, Mandrake (and so now Mandriva) sets it's logrotate system to compress your log files every week (or month?) and remove the *old* compressed-logs (you should have a number of compress-log files, so you can look at logs going back for quite a while), but at 3am in the morning. If your machine is not running at 3am, then your logs won't get rotated, and so will just keep on getting bigger and bigger. These should be under /var/log. Since you haven't got /var on a separate partition, it will use the space on your / partition... much like if you created large files under C:\FILES it would reduce the overall space for C:\. Grant. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html