ubuntu /var file full and do not have read permissions [closed]

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I seem to have hosed myself, as I was running/learning some failing PHP/MySQL data scrape script and went off to bed. I don't know if it looped or what exactly happened, but I came back and it showed disk almost full. The analyzer said I had used almost 100G of a 100G drive on a /var directory. I try du and df-ah, but it will not show where the hog is. Says, "Permission denied." for many of the directories.

Clues: 1) gdm directory is listed as recent but won't let me look inside. 2) I was running an edit program called gksudo gedit, because I could not write to /var/www files for PHP. It appears that in the ps window, a nautilus program is dormant.

Any help is greatly appreciated and I love ubuntu, but I'm pretty much a linux newbie. Thanks.

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Do you have root permissions?

sudo bash

Then you can go in and look into what is going on.

cd /var
du -s *

Oh, and I hope I don't have to mention that you should not delete stuff that you didn't create yourself. You might just delete something important.

You report that /var/log/apache seems "large". I do NOT recommend simply deleting the files. Instead, if you are very very sure that no-one will ever need to see any historical archives of the errors and accesses made, you can:

cd /var/log/apache
for f in *; do > $f; done

which will truncate the files. This will make it less likely to cause problems due to non-existant files or bad permissions or required rotation signaling. If you might need these files in the future, we could talk about using logrotate to try and save them.

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The filesystem permissions require root access to read many of the directories in /var:

ls -l /var

...
drwx--x--x  3 root root  4096 2011-04-04 23:13 www

You just need root privileges to read them all:

sudo -s
cd /var/www
ls -l

Be careful running with a root shell. You can make a ton of mistakes really quickly, some might be difficult to undo. :)