Managing Used Space

phild

• April 21, 2014 15:11

Hi, my server became too full and so I googled how to clean it up and release space. One of the things I found was to run this command: rm -rf /home/*/tmp/* in about twenty seconds it had freed up several GB of space and I have to admit I panicked thinking it was wiping the drive clean so stopped it. This is the first time I have run this command on a server that has been running for two years and contains a few hundred sites. Could it just be that the command was well overdue to be run, or is it going to to do some things I dont want it to? (although looking around, all seems ok). Thank you in advance for your time and help. Phil.

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  MikeDVB

  • April 21, 2014 21:07

  Personally I'd probably set up tmpwatch to clear files older than ~72 hours [or a week, or a month] for /home/*/tmp. The idea of a temporary folder is that you can clear it's contents without damage but this may not actually always be the case [such as with the server-wide /tmp where socks may be stored and data for some running processes] although they *should* be able to recover from this gracefully. That said - be very careful with "rm -rf" If you were to type this "rm -rf / home/*/tmp/*" instead of "rm -rf /home/*/tmp/*" you would wipe your server. This is a simple typo of an extra space.

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  phild

  • April 21, 2014 21:13

  Thank you very much for the info - much appreciated. That space is one heck of an important space!

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  cPanelMichael

  • April 22, 2014 14:51

  Hello :) I do not recommend utilizing that command. It will delete data that is necessary to display your statistics and bandwidth within cPanel for those accounts. Instead, I suggest first checking to see where most of your disk space usage is coming from using the instructions here: cPanel - Manage HD Space Thank you.

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