Help - Log files filling up my hard drive!!

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I am running OS X 10.5.8 on my imac. Not too sure when the problem started but i noticed it a couple of weeks ago when I had a message indicating "my start-up disk was full". I did some digging and saw that my 300 GB hard drive was full. I do not have that many items on the system so I downloaded a "what size" program to check where the largest files were and found that there was 160GB in a /private/var/log/sys file.

I did some more digging and found that this could be fixed by deleting these files in Terminal doing it this way:

Restart log managers after removing asl data Open the Terminal application and enter the following two commands to stop the log managers:

sudo launchctl stop com.apple.syslogd
sudo launchctl stop com.apple.aslmanager

Then create a folder on your desktop called "temp" (to store the moved "data store" files), and enter the following command in the Terminal to move the "ASL" data to the new temporary folder:

sudo mv /var/log/asl/* ~/Desktop/temp/

Finally, restart the "syslogd" process with the following command (the aslmanager will be started when needed by syslogd, so it doesnt need to be manually restarted):

sudo launchctl start com.apple.syslogd

This worked for about 100GB of the data; however the issue continues to re-occur and fills up the hard drive within a few days again.

I have tried to go in and repeat the process above but now Terminal is giving me this message:
Broadcast Message from [email protected]
(no tty) at 7:44 PST...

Feb 26 07:44:24 jerry-bottis-imac-6 kernel[0]:

over and over again.

I need some help here folks - any ideas???

Jerryb
 
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Yes I should have mentioned that as well. I have used Onyx a few times, but to no avail.
 

vansmith

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This worked for about 100GB of the data; however the issue continues to re-occur and fills up the hard drive within a few days again.
This is your problem (not so much the logs themselves). Something keeps logging, creating this unnecessary collection of log files. What are the log files you're deleting for?
 
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Kinda like vansmith was saying:
Have you used the Console Utility to read the logs to figure out what is actually causing log entries to be written?
 
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Feb 27 17:41:59 jerry-bottis-imac-6 com.apple.launchd[1] (com.rim.BBDaemon[23130]): posix_spawn("/Library/Application Support/BlackBerry/BBDaemon", ...): No such file or directory
Feb 27 17:41:59 jerry-bottis-imac-6 com.apple.launchd[1] (com.rim.BBDaemon[23130]):
The console message reads a ton of what is listed below. Seems to be connected to my blackberry, but that was application was un-installed months ago. Maybe not?

Exited with exit code: 1
Feb 27 17:41:59 jerry-bottis-imac-6 com.apple.launchd[1] (com.rim.BBDaemon): Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds
Feb 27 17:42:06 jerry-bottis-imac-6 com.apple.launchd[129] (com.rim.BBLaunchAgent[23131]): posix_spawn("/Library/Application Support/BlackBerry/BBLaunchAgent.app", ...): No such file or directory
Feb 27 17:42:06 jerry-bottis-imac-6 com.apple.launchd[129] (com.rim.BBLaunchAgent[23131]): Exited with exit code: 1
Feb 27 17:42:06 jerry-bottis-imac-6 com.apple.launchd[129] (com.rim.BBLaunchAgent): Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds
Feb 27 17:42:09 jerry-bottis-imac-6 com.apple.launchd[1] (com.rim.BBDaemon[23132]): posix_spawn("/Library/Application Support/BlackBerry/BBDaemon", ...): No such file or directory
Feb 27 17:42:09 jerry-bottis-imac-6 com.apple.launchd[1] (com.rim.BBDaemon[23132]): Exited with exit code: 1
Feb 27 17:42:09 jerry-bottis-imac-6 com.apple.launchd[1] (com.rim.BBDaemon): Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds

When I look into the Private/var/log/sys folder, there is a ton of .asl files
similar to this:
2012.02.26.U0.G80.asl

Not sure what they mean
 

vansmith

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You've got quite a few BlackBerry related errors there. I have to wonder how often the BB daemon is called.

Is it the ASL logs that keep growing or the system logs?
 
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Looks like a broken installation of Blackberry software. It's trying to respawn things that don't exist on your system ie: there are apparently no files called:
BBLaunchAgent.app
com.rim.BBDaemon

Either you removed the software without the uninstaller, and there are still remnants of the application trying to keep the agent alive, or your installation went south and didn't install all the way.

If you want to fix it, you probably either need to reinstall the software to replace the needed file(s), or you need to reinstall the software and then use it's uninstaller to then remove all the components.

Either way, you will likely want to restart the system after doing so to clear out the launchd process in RAM.

Alternatively, you can try running from the terminal launchdctl and then type list to see what running around in there. From there you can disable or remove whatever is giving you headaches.

Here's a man page to halp you out as well...

https://developer.apple.com/library...nchctl.1.html#//apple_ref/doc/man/1/launchctl
 
C

chas_m

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The usual easy way to fix this is to REINSTALL the application in question and then *properly* uninstall it using the instructions provided by the maker. Programs that have to mess with the system (as a BB sync program would) can't just be dragged to the trash.
 

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