Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

Lord Ko · Mar 26, 2003, 07:01 AM

Hi,

Since 2 weeks my system logs (in /private/var/log) are getting huge.

The first one to get huge system.log.0 is 1.93GB!!! The curent one system.log is already 244.5MB!

The only new application that i used in this period of time was Acquisition. I used it for 2 days and realised my logs became huge. I since stopped using it and they stopped growing.

By the way system.log.2.gz to system.log.7.gz are all between 9MB and 22MB.

Has this happened to someone before, and is it safe to delete the system logs? especialy the 1.93GB. Or do i have to waint until it's deleted by the system?

Thanks

Lordko

chris v · Mar 26, 2003, 07:24 AM

Hmm... I don't have anything larger than 600k in that folder, and the system logs are all either 4 or 8 k.

Mac Janitor will run your daily, weekly and monthly chron jobs, which should clean up the log files, instead of having to wait, but I have no clue why they'd be that big.

CV

Person Man · Mar 26, 2003, 12:53 PM

Originally posted by Lord Ko:
Hi,

Since 2 weeks my system logs (in /private/var/log) are getting huge.

The first one to get huge system.log.0 is 1.93GB!!! The curent one system.log is already 244.5MB!

The only new application that i used in this period of time was Acquisition. I used it for 2 days and realised my logs became huge. I since stopped using it and they stopped growing.

By the way system.log.2.gz to system.log.7.gz are all between 9MB and 22MB.

Has this happened to someone before, and is it safe to delete the system logs? especialy the 1.93GB. Or do i have to waint until it's deleted by the system?

Thanks

Lordko

Yes, it is safe to delete the log files with .gz at the end. I wouldn't try to delete the currently running log file though. Force a run of the cron jobs with MacJanitor, and then you can safely delete the .gz log files without problems.

You may want to take a look in the log files too, to see what it is that is making them get so big.

Fallout · Mar 26, 2003, 06:30 PM

Yeah, scroll through the logs, you've definitely got some problems. The biggest file in mine is 104 KB.

Appleman · Mar 26, 2003, 07:15 PM

OK, I give up. I searched for "var", "private", etc.

Where do I find this "system logs (in /private/var/log)"?

gorickey · Mar 26, 2003, 07:24 PM

Originally posted by Appleman:
OK, I give up. I searched for "var", "private", etc.

Where do I find this "system logs (in /private/var/log)"?

Turn visibility to "All"...those are invisible folders.

suthercd · Mar 26, 2003, 07:32 PM

Leave you machine on all night- no sleep mode. There are a maintenace scripts that run a night. One nightly, one weekly (Saturday) and one monthly. They will address the issue.

Or there are several utilities that will do this whenever you want. In addition this can be done with the CLI from the Terminal

HTH

Craig

Millennium · Mar 26, 2003, 08:02 PM

Old logs are routinely compressed with gzip and filed away. These -the ones which end in .gz- can be safely deleted, though if you suspect your machine might be under attack you might want to keep them around.

Just don't delete the currently active log. That would be a Bad Thing.

Lord Ko · Mar 26, 2003, 08:16 PM

Thanks for all the replies :-)

I tried to look inside my log file, but it's so big that i just looked at the begining. It seems to contain everything the system was doing nearly every second! But does not seem like error messages.

I just ran MacJanitor, it solved the problem, lets hope that my huge logs don't come back!

The funny thing is that i am not having any problems with my computer. It's a pismo 500, it's running nicely in 10.2.4. I never had any problem installing or updating software (unlike many people in version tracker)

My log became big the day i tried a new version of Acquisition and it's why i am blaming it. Well anyway now that i know MacJanitor i'll try Aquisition again.

Thanks again!

Lordko