kern.log and syslog are too big

[Gyrth]

I think I found a bug. I was trying to make my pi to make a timelapse with an usb webcam. With a cronjob it would start my timelapse.sh and write the images to a usb device. Now I was editing my timelapse.sh file and wanted to save. But it said I didn't have enough space left. I tried using rasp-config a few times to expand the root-fs but that didn't work. So I plugged the sd-card into my pc and began to check what was so big on the filesystem. It turns out kern.log and syslog are 3.6 gigs together. I think this is a bug of some sort. I deleted the files and plugged it back into the Raspberry Pi. Now it workes great again.

[elatllat]

your cron job (or something) is probably producing way more output than it should.
"tail /var/log/kern.log" to find out what the spam is and what is making it.
silence whatever it is with ">/dev/null 2>&1"
or adjust logrotate to clean up faster.
make sure no other logs are big "du -sch /var/log/*"

[SDsolar]

It is very easy to delete these multi-GB files.

sudo rm /var/log/kern*

sudo rm /var/log/messages*

This will speed up rsync backups and help with disk space.

[rpdom]

Welcome to the forums.

Congratulations. You just replied (somewhat incorrectly) to a four year old post.

You can "rm" a file that is currently in use by another process, but the space used by that file won't be freed up until that process is finished with it.

Don't let that put you off though, learning stuff is just part of being here. Even as a long time Unix/Linux user I've learnt a lot since I got my first Pi and started reading this forum

[barsznica]

This is how I solved my issue.

Please use that newer thread to avoid duplicates!