nohup disk full

Issue

• Running nohup can cause disk full
• logrotate can handle both disk issue and log rotation issue

Solution

How to limit size of nohup.out in linux

To limit the size of nohup.out in Linux, you can use either the logrotate utility or a custom script.

1. Using logrotate: Logrotate is a system utility designed specifically to manage the automatic rotation, compression, removal, and mailing of log files. It is typically installed by default on most Linux distributions.

You can specify the size limit and how many rotations you want in /etc/logrotate.conf. Here is an example configuration:

/path/to/your/nohup.out {
        size 1k
        rotate 4
}

In this example, logrotate will run only if the filesize is equal to (or greater than) 1 kilobyte. The rotate 4 directive limits the number of log file rotations, so this would keep only the recent 4 rotated log files. After setting up the configuration, run logrotate /etc/logrotate.conf to apply the changes Source 0.

2. Using a custom script: If you cannot stop the currently running script, you can use a custom script to limit the size of nohup.out. This script will run in the background, checking the size of nohup.out every 60 seconds. If the size exceeds a certain limit (e.g., 10KB), it will create a copy of nohup.out, clear its contents, and increment a counter.

Here is an example of such a script:

nohup sh -c 'COUNTER=1; while true; do SIZE=$(stat --printf="%s" nohup.out); if [ $SIZE -gt 10000 ]; then cp nohup.out "nohup$COUNTER.out"; echo "" > nohup.out; COUNTER=$((COUNTER + 1)); fi; sleep 60; done' >/dev/null 2>&1 &

This script will create a backup of nohup.out if it’s larger than 10KB and truncate nohup.out for new output Source 0.