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fmowrg
Asked: 2010-10-07 14:32:53 +0800 CST

How can i remove old content from syslog in System Log Viewer?

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When l look into Ubuntu's System Log Viewer (I think that's the name in English) the messages categories are blown up with 70000 lines and almost 12MB in size. It mixes up messages from May this year and recent messages from the last few days.

How can I remove the old messages from May?

gnome

2 Answers

  1. The packages logrotate and rsyslog together will set up your system for automatic archiving and aging the syslog files.

    There are plenty of options to the logrotate(8) command that will help you truncate the current mess and then the rest should happen automatically.

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  2. How can I remove the old messages from May?

    There are two ways. If it was up to me, I'd determine the importance of the

    1. Shutdown syslog/rsyslog, sudo vi /var/log/messages, and remove the lines from May. Then start up syslog/rsyslog again.
    2. Be patent, and allow `logrotate (8) to rotate the log for you.

    @fmowrg :

    It sounds like you added some duplicate lines to your logrotate configuration.

    The file /var/log/messages (and most files under /var/log) should be rotated by /etc/logrotate.d/syslog (Or a similar file under /etc/logrotate.d/. Do a grep /var/log/messages /etc/logrotate.d/* to be sure).

    There should be no need to add /var/log/messages to the file at /etc/logrotate.conf .

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