Since I've seen several people asking this same question, I decided to put this up as a HowTo for people. Once again, this goes out to Webbcite for a thank you!

Clearing Email Sent To Mail Root:
cat /dev/null > /var/spool/mail/root

Clearing Logs:

cat /dev/null > /var/log/logname


Thanks old great evil smiling sun in the sky!

Cajun

Can any log in /var/log and its directories be emptied this way, and what are the repercussions?

btw thanks so much to the responsive people on this board! I wish I'd known to come here first before spending umpteen hours on the ensim site looking for non-existent answers.

Ensim's support site is a SUCKAZAURUS!! It's funny, though, most people here are starting to post over there.

By the way, the answer to your question is yes.

Cajun

i dunno if this had anything to do with it but less than an hour after i ran these commands my server died and needed a restore. Im sure they didnt but just letting ya know. My init wasnt found on a reboot so i dunno if they removed somethings they shouldnt

I've used these commands to clear log files for a while now with no problems.

Cajun

Thank you so much, I have been looking for this all over the place. Thank you thank you!!

One question though, does this clear all the logs on the server? All sites logs are cleared and stuff? Or only the server ones?

You can use these to clear all server logs. If you go into /var/logs , you can clear any in there.

Cajun

Nice, though the root mail cleaner isnt necessary for me though as ive set it up so that mail gets sent to another account which i use to view such email anyway, though nice alternative for me to use to delete the logs, cheers .

Just wondering, are these the same commands which prompted your thread in the Ensim catagory with the word "ooops"? lol.. Mouse

My site uses a lot of CGI and my suexec_log grows fast. I have a daily cron which justs "mv suexec_log suexec_log.1"

If I can do this why can't you just delete any log? In case the error trapping of the program which uses the log is not good enough?

When you delete a file, you don't close it. Only when the file is closed, and the INode released is the space given up. The Inode belonging to that file is still in use, and still receving data from apache. So the used space on your disk grows, but there's no file attached to it. When you use his trick (which effectively onyl sets the file size to 0) if resets the EOF pointer to the beginning of the file, and frees the disk space.

tip:
I use crontabs to delete logs daily (especially mail/root)

things are better now.

*s*

in /var/log/httpd I have this:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root apache 685213324 Jan 13 21:36 suexec_log

Is it "OK" to use the above method to delete this or would it be harful to do so?

yes that would be fine... Mouse

how would you run this as a cronjob?