How do I limit the size of my syslog?

Posted by Wayne Werner on Ask Ubuntu See other posts from Ask Ubuntu or by Wayne Werner
Published on 2012-09-07T02:07:22Z Indexed on 2012/09/07 3:48 UTC
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12.04

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syslog

I've got my mom's computer running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. It's been working just fine but all of the sudden syslog has been filling up. And by filling up I mean I just deleted a /var/log/syslog that was 400GB in size. Yes - Gigabytes.

While I'm sure there was some useful information in there, I'm not sure that 400GB is any kind of information to sift through. And what's really amazing about it is that it happened within a period of 8 hours - I had ran df around noon, and between then and now her drive filled up 30% (from just under 70% to 100%).

What could be causing this and how could I fix it?`

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