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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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help: var folder on ubuntu won't stop filling up (midwest.social)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I've had an Ubuntu 22.04 setup going for around a year, and over that year I've had to increase the size of the partition holding my /var folder multiple times. I'm now up to 20GB and again running into problems, mainly installing new apps, because that partition is again nearly full. I've used commands sudo apt clean and sudo journalctl --vacuum-size=500 to temporarily clear up some space, but it doesn't take long to fill back up, and gets less effective with time, til I have no choice but to expand the partition again.

Am I doing something wrong? Is it normal to need 20GB+ for var? Is there a way to safely reclaim space I don't know about?

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

If you suspect that the issue is journald, you can use the following command to check how much space it is using:

journalctl --disk-usage

Rather than periodically running journalctl --vacuum-size=500 to free up space, you can just limit the journal by adding the following to a new file such as /etc/systemd/journald.conf.d/size.conf:

[Journal]
SystemMaxUse=512M

This will limit the journal from using more than 512MB. That said, if journald is filling up fast, then something is spamming your logs and you could run journal -a -f to get a sense of what is being written to your logs.