Why is /var so big?

[Craig White]

On Sat, 2005-03-19 at 21:11 -0800, Jephthah wrote:
> Without looking into it too deeply, I would guess your /var/cache is
> previously viewed webpages.  And it's the only thing that is really
> causing you grief in /var...  The rest consumes a trival amount.
> 
> So just do a  "rm -rf /var/cache" to wipe it out.
> 
> You can make this command an alias and/or add it to your startup script
> or even a regularly occuring cron action if you like.  
----
# ls -l /var/cache/samba
total 172
-rw-------    1 root     root         8192 Aug  1  2004
account_policy.tdb
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root          696 Jan  1 12:42 brlock.tdb
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root          225 Mar 19 22:04 browse.dat
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root        16384 Jan 26 01:27 connections.tdb
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root         8192 Sep  9  2004 gencache.tdb
-rw-------    1 root     root         8192 Aug  1  2004
group_mapping.tdb
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root        24576 Jan 26 01:37 locking.tdb
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root          696 Nov 11 16:30 login_cache.tdb
-rw-------    1 root     root         8192 Jan  1 17:45 messages.tdb
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root         7848 Mar 13 04:02 namelist.debug
-rw-------    1 root     root         8192 Jul 31  2004 ntdrivers.tdb
-rw-------    1 root     root          696 Jul 31  2004 ntforms.tdb
-rw-------    1 root     root         8192 Jul 31  2004 ntprinters.tdb
drwxr-xr-x    2 root     root         4096 Jul 31  2004 printing
-rw-------    1 root     root         8192 Aug  1  2004 registry.tdb
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root        24576 Jan  1 17:44 sessionid.tdb
-rw-------    1 root     root         8192 Jul 27  2004 share_info.tdb
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root         8192 Jan 26 20:48 unexpected.tdb
drwxr-x---    2 root     squid        4096 Dec 20 15:50
winbindd_privileged
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root          544 Mar 19 22:09 wins.dat

I'd say on the whole that giving advice to some to 

rm -fr /var/cache 

without considering all of the potential implications of doing that
would be really rotten advice

without considering what it will do to yum/apt etc. (break them)

/var - if set to it's own partition should have at least 2 Gigabytes -
more if it's a mail server or a web server.

You can configure yum to remove all of the rpm's it downloads after it
installs them...see Alexander's reply

Craig



Craig