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MountainX
Asked: 2012-03-30 13:20:21 +0800 CST

How do I reduce the size of mlocate database?

  • 772

I'm out of space on /var

  25G   25G     0 100% /var

It looks like mlocate.db is the problem:

# find /var -printf '%s %p\n' | sort -nr | head
13140140032 ./lib/mlocate/mlocate.db.cgLMAM
12409839616 ./lib/mlocate/mlocate.db.MqGeqe

# cat /etc/updatedb.conf
PRUNE_BIND_MOUNTS="yes"
PRUNENAMES=".git .bzr .hg .svn"
PRUNEPATHS="/tmp /var/spool /media"
PRUNEFS="NFS nfs nfs4 rpc_pipefs afs binfmt_misc proc smbfs autofs iso9660 ncpfs coda devpts ftpfs devfs mfs shfs sysfs cifs lustre_lite tmpfs usbfs udf"

I don't see anything else to prune. So how can I fix this? Thanks

filesystem disk-usage locate

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The /var/lib/mlocate/mlocate.db.?????? files are leftover temporary files from a (probably) interrupted updatedb run. They don't appear on either of my Ubuntu 11.10 systems, except when updatedb is running. Delete them:

    sudo rm -f /var/lib/mlocate/mlocate.db.??????

    then, to be sure, run 

    sudo /etc/cron.daily/mlocate
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  2. You can re-install it too:

    apt remove --purge mlocate \
&& apt install mlocate

    It will delete and recreate your /var/lib/mlocate database file.

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