Freedisk command...

[Shaun Aldrich_1]

Hello everyone,

I have done a little reading on the freedisk command and was thinking of giving it a try. It states that it is supposed to list and remove software that has not been used for a long time.

Just wanted to check before I use it if anyone has or heard of anyone having any bad experiencing with this command? Does this command save much disk space? Let me know your thoughts.

Thanks.

[Steffi Jones_1 · Accepted solution]

Hello,

how much it actually saves depends really on what you have "lying" around on your filesystem.
You can run the command and always break out of it if your are not sure, if you really want to delete the files.

Another way is to run cleanup (10.20) to get some of the older patches of the system.

If you want to save some diskspace see if you can decrese the size of log files all over the system.

In general it is always good to determine where and why you run out of diskspace and plan ahead and size the lvol's appropiate.

Hope that gives you some ideas,

Steffi Jones

[Patrick Wallek]

Shaun,

I have been playing with freedisk today on my personal workstation and it hasn't been pretty. For reference, I've got a B132L workstation with 192 MB RAM running HP-UX 11.0.

Freedisk works in 2 phases, at the end of phase 1, which analyses the regular files and filesets, it is supposed to bring up swremove to allow you to remove, if you want, what it has found to be unnecessary on your system. I have tried running freedisk twice today. The first time I had my DISPLAY variable set so it attempted to bring up the GUI version of swremove. It never did come up completely and eventually swremove failed and freedisk moved on to phase 2, which I skipped. The second time I ran freedisk, I unset the DISPLAY so it would bring up the character based swremove. My thinking being that the GUI took up too many resources. Well, the character based did not work any better. In fact, it messed up the terminal window I was running freedisk from.

So, based on my experiences with this program today, I would recommend against using it. I think your best bet would be to keep a close eye on what software is installed on your machines and make sure that whatever is installed is absolutely necessary. As was suggested before as well, I would also keep an eye on the various system log files so that they remain at a manageable size.