A.P. Lawrence

This article is from a FAQ concerning SCO operating systems. While some of the information may be applicable to any OS, or any Unix or Linux OS, it may be specific to SCO Xenix, Open Desktop or Openserver.

There is lots of Linux, Mac OS X and general Unix info elsewhere on this site: Search this site is the best way to find anything.

Unix, Xenix and ODT General FAQ

How do I clear log files?

Generally, you can just use the ">" to empty a log file. For example, to clear out /var/adm/syslog, just use:

 > /var/adm/sylog

That will empty the file while leaving ownerships and permissions intact.

Sometimes, however, you have a program that keeps the file open while it writes to the log. In such a case, you may need to stop the program, clear the log, and restart.

You can easily check to see if any process is using a file with "fuser":

 fuser /var/adm/syslog

will return the pid of syslog. You can combine all this:

 ps -p `fuser /var/adm/syslog`

(It's not necessary to stop the syslogd process when clearing syslog)