What's /var/log/lastlog for?

[Matthew Miller]

On Tue, Jun 07, 2005 at 09:09:38PM -0700, Frank Chen wrote:
> I noticed that /var/log/lastlog is almost 20M. What's
> this file for? Can I reduce its size? I am trying to
> squeeze the /var directory into a small space.

It's not as big as you think -- it's a "sparse" file, in which null data
doesn't actually take up disk space. Try "du -h /var/log/lastlog" to see the
amount of disk space it's actually taking -- probably only a few K.

-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org        <http://www.mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>                <http://linux.bu.edu/>
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