rootfs space slowly decreasing
 

After reflashing my N900 and installing all the desired apps, I had about 73 MiB of space in the rootfs filesystem. About two months have passed and my rootfs space is slowly decreasing everyday, about 100 kiB or less per day. Now I have only 69.3 MiB. I think that there should be some logfiles that are growing inside my rootfs filesystem, or other data that the OS is not properly cleaning after every boot. Did you know about this behavior?

Thank you.

Re: rootfs space slowly decreasing
 

Common issue for applications installed from Extras-Devel.
There are loads of threads on rootfs space here have a good read through them.

Re: rootfs space slowly decreasing
 

I do not have any app installed from Extras-devel. Indeed, I have read many of the threads (not all of them) and I found no response to my question.

Re: rootfs space slowly decreasing
 

Quick reply...
Open a file manager which has access to the root directory ("/") of the N900. Like, "filebox".
Go to root directory ("/").
Sort the folders and files (biggest first).
Find the largest files.
Post their names and sizes here, so that others could advise on whether these files can be deleted, and how they were created.
Best wishes.
__________________
Per aspera ad astra...

Re: rootfs space slowly decreasing
 

@ikerrg,

I guess you don't just want to delete/move the bigger files, but want to know what files are being created/grown.

As a rough starting point, you might want to play with find:

EDIT EDIT EDIT: I meant -mtime -1, not -mtime 1

will display files (from the current directory, recursively) that have been touched/modified in the last 24h (or calendar day, not sure).

In theory such files should be found on /var (/bin, /sbin, /usr, /lib should essentially be read-only, except maybe for /usr/share..)

Do you regularly (daily) update the dpkg database (apt-get update). That may explain the slow increase in rootfs use (don't get me started on dpkg/apt-get and why it's an enormous piece of sh*t).

Re: rootfs space slowly decreasing
 

You are right, reinob.

Using your command, many modified files appear in system
directories, and between them many %gconf.xml. I have changed your command to also filter them by size:

but I have not found any modified file of that size (also no luck with 512k).

I usually update the repositories searching for updates, but not in the commandline but in HAM or fappman (same as apt-get anyway). The downloaded repositories (mainly Extras) shoud grow a bit along the time, but not so much I think.

Re: rootfs space slowly decreasing
 

@reinob

I remember that I had one unexpected reboot of my N900 (maybe because a high overclocking of the DSP that I have already changed). Do you know if a reboot could cause that some temp files are not removed? Is there any crashlog register in maemo?

Re: rootfs space slowly decreasing
 

I think I have found the problem. Comparing two snapshots of my rootfs partition made with backupmenu, I found the growing file: the history of the console shell (for root access user) The file is /root/.ash_history and it is more than 3 MiB big. I have not found the history command in maemo in order to clean it, so I think I can manually delete it to reset the history.

Re: rootfs space slowly decreasing
 

You can delete the history file without any issues. Actually, you may be one of the few lucky guys where the busybox shell history works properly. There is/was a long-standing bug of history not been saved :)

Re: rootfs space slowly decreasing
 

my N900's rootfs free storage is even lower it is at 45 mb and decreasing. im using CSSU-Thumb with KP51.