July 7, 2024

Delete large log files with ncdu - “no space left on device”

I got the following message as I was trying to install libretranslate:

OSError: [Errno 28] No space left on device: '/tmp/libretranslate-files-translate'

The command df -h showed that / was full:

$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
tmpfs           790M  3.0M  787M   1% /run
/dev/sda3        19G   18G   64K 100% /
tmpfs           3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
/dev/sda2       512M  296K  512M   1% /boot/efi
/dev/sda4       447G  408G   39G  92% /home
tmpfs           790M  5.5M  784M   1% /run/user/1000

I ran ncdu -x / and saw that /var/log/ were greater than 2 GB.

I looked through the log running journalctl -e -n100000 and saw that an application (backintime) was filling up the log (maybe there is something else which I missed; I will see if the logs fill up again).

I deleted a few /var/log/journal/ files via ncdu.

personal computing command-line interface (cli) gnu linux trisquel shell literacy wiki ncdu journalctl