Cleaning up stale logs in Bookworm

You can control this and other aspects of logfile usage via journald.conf

man logrotate ?

Umm. Are these old style logs or the dreaded systemd?

I maintained a log/script of how to get the best out of a pi Zero and never ever write to its SD card...

echo "tmpfs /var/ramlog tmpfs nodev,nosuid,noexec,nodiratime,size=25M

# /var/ramlog is used for everything except systemd. Logrotate keeps it tidy. # various entties that create log files have to be configured to dump stuff in it.

## f*ck with shitsemd

sed -i "s/#Storage=auto/Storage=volatile/" /etc/systemd/journald.conf sed -i "s/#RuntimeMaxUse=/RuntimeMaxUse=25M/" /etc/systemd/journald.conf sed -i "s/#ForwardToConsole=yes/ForwardToConsole=no/" /etc/systemd/journald.conf sed -i "s/#ForwardToWall=yes/ForwardToWall=no/" //etc/systemd/journald.conf

#Using volatile storage puts it in /var/run/systemd and /var/run is created as a ram # based file system by the operating system

Naturally systemd doesn't use logrotate. Wheels must be constantly reinvented, but RuntimeMaxUse=25M does most of what you want

This is a systemd machine, but after looking around in response to suggestions made above it seems less than 5 MB is used by journals. That's not enough to matter.

Evidently I've just added too many packages.

Is there some way to coax the Add/Remove Programs application to list installed packages, ideally by size? Then I can clean house manually. The chromium browser will likely be the first to go 8-)

Thanks to all for replying, and apologies for the misguided question!

bob prohaska

One occasional problem I had on my previous laptop was it would fill up the root partition every now and then with old cached package files. These are normally not needed after the package is actually installed.

Check your disk usage for this cache with

du -ks /var/cache/apt/archives/

and see if it looks excessive. Anything you delete from there should be automatically downloadable again if it’s needed. ;)

Bingo! It's over one GB. Not my whole problem, but a big chunk of it.

Thank you!

bob prohaska

Edit /etc/systemd/journald.conf file to enable SystemMaxUse and set it equal to some value that will give you enough but not too much logs. I use 128M. If you have files building up in /var/log, every month I delete all the .gz archived logs. This is an example script:

#!/bin/bash

echo "delete-old-logs"

rm -v /var/log/*.gz rm -v /var/log/apache2/*.gz rm -v /var/log/apt/*.gz rm -v /var/log/cups/*.gz rm -v /var/log/lightdm/*.gz rm -v /var/log/unattended-upgrades/*.gz

Change or add to the list above according to you actual needs.

Use logrotate rather than munging your own script, that's what its there for. Otherwise you can guarantee the source of your problem is in the logs you just have just deleted.

---druck

But it seems they were logs so much as cached packages