aging-files

[Bill Brutzman]

This file in the root directory is rather large; I want to delete it.

Of course, I do not want to whack anything.

-rw-rw-rw- 1 root sys
799104 Sep 2 1999
aging-files

Comments would be appreciated.

[nancy rippey]

This is probably an output file that someone created back in 1999 and should be safe to delete. If you want to be really safe you can back the file to another filesystem, server, or to tape.
The timestamp is back from 1999, which would have been the last time it was written to. I would assume your server has been rebooted since then. I generally enter 'uptime' and if the uptime is less than the date of the file it generally can be removed. Of course this is only for non system files which this appears to be.

[Darrell Allen]

Hi Bill,

It's probably un-needed. You can do a couple of things:

"fuser /aging-files" will show if the file is being accessed

"file /aging-files" will give you a "best guess" as to what type of file it is. If it is some sort of text file then you can use "more /aging-files" to look at it.

It's not an Operating System file. And as Nancy says, you can back it up if you're uncertain. It's only ~800KB.

Darrell

[Wodisch]

Hello Bill,

try "file" on that file. If it tells you it is a textfile you can "compress" or "gzip" to safe some space...
And it is really NOT an "official" operating system file, nor a file created/used automatically by any known standard UN*X command.

But if you need 800KB of space on your root-file-system, you DO have another problem :-(
Perhaps check your "/dev/" directory for files having device names (like "/dev/rmt/0m" NOT being a device but a huge file), to recover more space...

Just my $0.02,
Wodisch

[Bill Brutzman]

Using the vi editor to open it, this file looks like a list of every file in our system.

I know that it has been changed subsequent to 1999 since it has my user ID in it and I joined this company in March-2001.

Without re-installing HP-Unix,
HP Tech Support tells me that there is no way to make the root bigger since the file "blocks" must be contiguous.

I expect that I will move "aging-files" to a directory called "\bak" and then see what happens. Thanks to those who responded.

[Darrell Allen]

Hi again,

Wodisch makes a good point that if you are close to filling the root filesystem you have more problems than the ~800KB file. Further, if /bak is not a separate filesystem then moving aging-files there isn't going to free any space.

In order to help, how about posting the output of the following commands:
bdf
ll /

That will be a starting point.

Darrell