How to safely delete Linux System Logs

Managing logfiles is a bit weirder in systemd/journalctl. Here's how to safely clean up old logfiles in Linux.

journalctl --vacuum-time=2d
journalctl --vacuum-size=100M

[staufackar]

I was afraid my virtual box was going to explode, thanks my man.

[samrybkin]

Hi maybe you have a video about troubleshooting in linux webserver ?

[quirklyquibble]

--vacuum-size= will not always free up space as requested because it won't look into recent logs.

--vacuum-size= removes the OLDEST ARCHIVED journal files until the disk space they use falls below the specified size (specified with the usual "K", "M", "G" and "T" suffixes), or ALL ARCHIVED journal files contain no data older than the specified timespan (specified with the usual "s", "m", "h", "days", "months", "weeks" and "years" suffixes).

[MrWARRIORMONKS]

very nice! thanks. Had 968M after only 3 months.

[GooogleGoglee]

Coincidence, I just cleaned my logs 5 days ago before this video and I had something like 6GB of logs

[usesap]

Is it bad if i just 'sudo rm /var/log' ?

[ApurvJyotirmay]

Thanks! I had 3.5G of logs on a tiny 50G partition :(

[budthecyborg]

My problem is it's the "syslog" spitting out hundreds of gigabytes of garbage data, none of the parsing or vaccum tricks seem to work there.

[Luka-qmri]

my syslog is 200GB and i installed ubuntu 2 days ago. how could this happen?

[haydenc]

Can you provide the commands you ran in the description please...or a link to what you are running?

[eisamohammadzadeh]

this is great bur this can use only for journal logs not all system logs

[paulg]

holy crap - I have 4.1G worth of logfiles on my system

[nibblrrr]

Journal needs a cuddle. System(d) needs a cuddle. Sys(tem) needs a cuddle. Network needs a cuddle. ALSA needs a cuddle. Pulse Audio needs two cuddles. Home needs a cuddle. Locale needs a cuddle. CUPS needs a cuddle...
We all need a cuddle. <3

[Clobercow]

I'm not saying cuddle or cuttle . It's dumb sounding.