Environment

iPrint Appliance 4.2
 

Situation

The root "/" partition reports a Use% of 100%. /tmp is part of the root filesystem.

The following command which should list 15 of the largest files fails.

du -aSh / | sort -rh | head -n 15

It results in error, "sort: write failed: /tmp/sortHNp4rn: No space left on device"

Rather, use this command to achieve the same goal.

find /var -printf '%s %p\n' | sort -nr | head -15 | while read -r size file; do echo "$(numfmt --to=iec-i --suffix=B --format='%.1f' "$size") $file"; done

For example, the largest file indicated above, at 26GB "messages-20230910", is safe to delete. It appears to be a very large log file that failed to logrotate to become /var/log/messages-20230910.xz because the free disk space was exhausted.
 

Resolution

Proceed to delete messages-20230910 and then reboot to resume normal operations.

cd /var/log
rm messages-20230910
reboot

Additional Information

The prudent next action would be to investigate the cause of the messages file becoming so large. Where possible, if it remains a contributing factor, disable excessive logging to any folder within the root partition.

Access article on support portal