List and get rid of obsolete program core dump
files and completely disable core files on FreeBSD
My FreeBSD router has started running out of space, I looked for
ways to clean up some space. So I remembered some programs are
generating
core files while they crash. Some of these files
are really huge and ban be from 1Mb to > 1G.
I used
find to first list all my produced core files
starting from
root directory (/) , like so:
find / -name core -exec du -hsc {} \;
....
Having a list of my core files with the respective
core file
size and after reviewing, I deleted one by one the
cores
which were there just taking up space.
It's a wise idea that
core dumps file generation on program
crash is completely disabled, however I forgot to disable
cores, so I had plenty of the cores -
(crash files which are
handy for debug purposes and fixing the bug that caused the
crash).
Further on I used an
/etc/rc.conf -
dumpdev=NO ,
variable which instructs the kernel to not generate core files on
program crash:
freebsd# echo 'dumpdev=NO' >>
/etc/rc.conf
Next, to make
dumpdev=NO , take affect I rebooted the
server:
freebsd# shutdown -r now
...
There is a way to instruct every server running daemon to know
about the newly set <> dumpdev=NO by restarting each of the
services with their init scripts individually, but I was too lazy
to do that.