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Yves
Asked: 2018-03-13 17:42:41 +0800 CST

what are system.journal and templates.dat

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I just found that there are two big files in my Ubuntu 16.04:

/run/log/journal/c840a48...(a very long name)...debfed5d/system.journal
/var/log/installer/cdebconf/templates.dat

My goal is to make the filesystem of Ubuntu as small as possible, so I'm thinking if I can remove these two files because they are all big enough (more than 10 MB).

It seems that they are two log files, so can I simply remove them? If they come from some processes, is it possible to disable the log system of these processes to prevent the two files to be generated?

filesystem log files

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Reducing log files to 10 MB seems overly optimistic. On my system /var/log is 194 MB:

    $ sudo du -h -d1 /var/log
148K    /var/log/lightdm
8.0K    /var/log/hp
4.0K    /var/log/speech-dispatcher
4.0K    /var/log/dist-upgrade
1.7M    /var/log/installer
4.0K    /var/log/upstart
4.0K    /var/log/gdm3
160K    /var/log/apt
185M    /var/log/journal
12K     /var/log/fsck
68K     /var/log/cups
4.0K    /var/log/unattended-upgrades
194M    /var/log

    The journal log file in question is 185 MB on my system and was 312 MB before I used the vacuum cleaner (function's real name) to reduce it's size below 200 MB.

    As far as /var/log/installer/cdebconf/ goes there is no such directory on my machine. I did find a reference where 75 GB was consumed there for someone else.

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