#! /bin/bash

# It so happend that in the dell installed with fedora 13 in the computer lab, PPSF, is being constantly used by human* users. The hardisk of the dell pc has been jammed up due to intense amount of log presumbably due to the constant use of mathematica/Virtual Box/ or whatever calculation constantly running.


# First I used 
df -h
# to find out the overall hardisk usage whether the / directory has been 100% full. 

# Go to /, and then use 

du -sch *

# to check the detailed directory sizes ub /. In case your / directory is full, the first suspect coming to your should be /var. 

# Issuing 
 
ls -lhrt /var/log/messages*

will show you how large are the message log files in /var/log/messages. 

# So I simply remove it to solve the problem:

rm -f /var/log/messages*

# Note that files in /var/log are mostly for logging purpose and is harmful to remove. It is possible to set the dell linux not to keep these log file automatically but i don't know how yet. 

# You need to be a su to remove the messages in /var/log/.