root partition used up space, unknown how!

[molinuxed]

hello all

I just a new problem i never witnessed..

I have a 15 GB partition allocated for kubuntu on my sony laptop, I have used approximately 6 GB, I don't know exactly cause i had not checked for a while.
Today and just after starting up and logging on to internet in a cafe by cable and was installing driver for a vodafone 3G usb connection on the laptop, I received a message saying I have no more space on the partition.
when i ran df in the shell it gave out that root partition is 100% full, all 15G was used.

I tried to locate where this excess usage was but to no avail. I then deleted some of the bigger files on the root partition and as soon as they were deleted and i had some space again it started filling up very quickly and again i had no space left.
so i deleted another big file except this time i unplugged the mobile usb internet connection and this time it did not use up the space, the new 800MB are still there.
I tried to locate where most of the used GB are and I found a file dated today in the home hidden files folder, xsession-errors with 7.1 GB i deleted but there was no additional space added.

then I found that the size of /dev/stderr and /dev/stdout 7.1 GB same as mentioned above.

I stopped here as I have no idea why this could have happened...


hope this was clear and all help is appreciated...

peace

[cantab]

Re: root partition used up space, unknown how!

It sounds like perhaps something is flooding a log file. But what and how I have no idea.

[SheeEttin]

Re: root partition used up space, unknown how!

Try looking at /dev/stdout or stderr to see what's logging to the file. Post a few sample lines if you're not sure what to do about it.

Also try uninstalling the Strigi daemon... It's known to eat up resources. (Open Adept, search for "strigi", and remove or purge the strigi-* packages. (Preview your changes before you apply them, please.))

[Teunis]

Re: root partition used up space, unknown how!

Kubuntu (KDE) has a nice little graphical utility to find the source of your problem:
KDirStat

Something similar but less refined is available in Konqueror, it's called file size view.