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Subject: RE: 14gb of error files...
From: Daniel Woods (dwoodsucalgary.ca)
Date: Mon Oct 23 2000 - 15:08:54 CDT

Jeff,

> I was out of disk space... having 14gb of mail error files (at least
> that's what the filenames look like) and 9gb of news.err news.crit and
> news.notice files ... in /var/log/mail and /var/log/news respectively.
> The news. files are really surprising, since I don't have a newsserver
> (that I know of) running. Would Postfix or Apache be tossing error
> messages in there?
>
> Now for the real problem... how to get rid of them. rm -f complains of
> "too many arguments" if I try to wildcard them... an example of a
> filename is news.notice.5.gz.5.gz.3.gz.5.gz.5.gz ... basically if I try
> and rm anything with less than 4 or 5 of the #.gz's in the middle, it
> complains. This is frustrating... because it's really slow.

I am guessing that you are running Mandrake 7.0 or 7.1 (which I use).
If so, then this is a known bug in the logrotate package. Get the latest
version of logrotate from the Mandrake updates/ directory. The problem
was it wanted to rotate /var/log/mail/*, which would then go ahead and
compress the existing gz files, and repeat again the next time, etc.

Thanks... Dan.