Re: safelly erasing dirs/files

On 2009-11-14, Joao Ferreira gmail <joao(dot)miguel(dot)c(dot)ferreira(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> ok. thx all for the explanation
>
> my problem is I a heavilly bloated pg database that has just filled up
> the partition
>
> data is in /var/pgsql/.. and /var is 100% full...
>
> vacuum/reindex is saying: I can't do it cause I have no space :(
>
> how do I un-bloat the /var partition ? this is why I was considering
> rm !!!!

If ubuntu or debian /var/cache/apt/archives/* can safely be removed
and will often free up a lot of space, (or on redhat
/var/cache/yum/*/packages/*)

If you installed from source you may have several daily log files you
can remove, redhat seems also to keep the logs around
thse files are often found in /var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_log and should
contain ascii text. Debian and ubuntu put them in /var/log/postgres
and use logrotate to trim them, but there maybe other files in /var/log
that can be truncated or erased to free up space.