Cleaning out /var in Solaris

Since your Solaris 10 installation, your data in the /var file system will grow each time you apply a patch. Depending on your patching strategy, over time you could find yourself running out of space, if you use a dedicated /var partition. This, in addition to mail, and logging from all kinds of applications can worsen the problem.

I’d say the best strategy is to increase the size of /var. If you’re using the standard UFS file system with no volume management, this means backing up, re-creating the partition, and restoring the data. If you do have some sort of volume management, sometimes the answer is a simple metattach/growfs or vxresize command.

If you want another option, just to get your by until you have the time to increase /var, there is another easy method. When patchadd adds any patch to the system, the files being replaced get saved off in case you need to remove the patch later, restoring these files. These files are compressed and stored in /var/sadm/pkg/ /save/ and in /var/sadm/pkg/ /save/pspool/ /save/. The files are called undo.Z.

Note: It is completely safe to delete these .Z files, as long as you are sure you will never need to back out its associated patch! Doing this can free up significant space.

I’ve even done things like this in a pinch: (the shotgun approach)

#find /var -name undo.Z -exec rm {} \;