usr contrib src cleanup

[Greg W. Webster]

Hello all,

I've somewhat inherited the task of system administration for an old HP-UX server. Unfortunately, the requests made of it are outstripping the resources it was originally built with...specifically, /usr just barely shy of completely full and I need to do some cleanup.

In /usr/contrib/src are the following files:
/usr/contrib/src # ls
gzip.info gzip135.tar.gz perl.info scsi_io.c
gzip124.tar.gz perl.copyright perl5.tar.gz

Is there any reason why the server would need/access these tar.gz files? I wish to move them elsewhere to get through the current crunch, but don't want to impact required processes. For what it's worth, those files have date stamps back as far as 2000, 2004 and 2006.

Thanks!

[Pete Randall · Accepted solution]

I suspect that the perl and the gnu zip utility was installed some time way back as far as 2000/2004/2006. If a new version was needed, new source would be downloaded at that time so I see no point in retaining these historical artifacts.


Pete

[Dennis Handly]

>I wish to move them elsewhere

You can always do that. And leave a symbolic link to the new location. Or just one to the new directory.

[Torsten.]

Looks like these are the application sources still packed as *.gz files - consider them as an archive only. IMHO you can safely move them away.

I would search for the unzipped sources too, they are probably also somewhere in your directory tree.

[Greg W. Webster]

Thanks all. I've moved those files off-server. It didn't make much difference, but every little bit helps.

[mvpel]

You can target your cleanup effort like so:

cd /usr
du -sk * .??* | sort -n

This will show you the size of each subdirectory in kilobytes sorted from smallest to largest.

You can repeat this process in each large subdirectory, drilling down to the largest disk space hogs in the filesystem. If you're lucky, you'll find the previous sysadmin's iTunes library and be able to just nuke it, freeing up 10%.

Be mindful of cross-filesystem boundaries - if you have a separate volume mounted as /usr/local, for instance, you can disregard that piece while you're trying to find stuff to clean up on /usr.

[Ismail Azad]

Hi greg,

Now since you are cleaning up, the whole point arises do you need all the "unsupported contributed software" in the filesystem /usr?? And just one thing (outta topic) but since you were mentioning /usr/contrib... it is the target for many "bomb scripts" like mroe. In case you are a security administrator as well, keep an eye on those.

Regards
Ismail Azad