So you have a raspberry pi. Maybe you have two. You might have a VPS as well. Maybe two. Maybe three. You could also have a x86 linux build or a SparcStation laying around, I dunno. Hell, you might be hoarding Unix or Linux PC’s for all I know. But what happens when these suckers run 24/7 and collect and document events from all sorts of services that are running?

You guessed it, your /var/log folder starts getting shit up with stuff. Like, a lot of stuff. Sometimes into the gigs.

How can you reclaim it? Well, if you’re smart, you’re not running systemd and you can just rm -rf * your logs. If you’re like me, you’re going to need something else.

journalctl --vacuum-size=500M

Behold- Systemd’s shitty journal control interface! Because rm wasn’t good enough, apparently. We had to invent a worse tool for freeing up space. Awesome. So what the above does, it starts at newest log events and goes back in time, but about 500 megabytes’ worth- then it deletes everything earlier than the 500 megabytes of most recent log events. You can also vacuum by date, but that’s kind of “meh”. Some days are log heavy and some days are light on logs, and it’ll vary too wildly for what I’m trying to accomplish.

So yeah, I turned a ten word post into a long rant because ADHD is bad. Good job. Alright, I’m going home and I’m taking my ball with me.