On Thu, 18 Jun 2020 02:12:28 -0400, Eli Schwartz via arch-general wrote:

On 6/18/20 2:09 AM, David C. Rankin wrote:

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This is more of what is the recommended practice ... for handling pacman.log?

Strange question, yes, but pacman.log is one of those that never gets rotated, etc.. The information in it isn't useful after a few upgrade cycles. So what is the general practice for dealing with it?

o Periodically delete it? o Split it by year with awk and compress it for?? Historical reasons? o Keep the last year?

It not one of those things I've ever thought about before, but grepping (after cleaning up the wide-character right-arrow from 2017/18 timeframe), I checked and I have 5M of log dating back to 2013. It's not hurting anything, but that got me thinking? What do others do with it, and is there any recommended manner for dealing with it?

I don't see any reason for keeping much of it beyond what you may be asked to post as part of a bug-report, etc.. which usually wouldn't be more than the last couple of months for most packages..

man 8 pacman doesn't provide any options for dealing with how much to keep or to truncate.

Among other things, it serves as a handy way to tell when you first installed the system. :)

I have so many better places to save 5mb of disk space, this doesn't even register in the top 400.

From 2013-02-17 02:54 until today its size became 13.7 MB on my install. I "collect" all local build packages in three cache directories, current/, old/ and very_old/. At the moment I don't feel the need to delete anything. In case of emergency I would delete the very old packages, not a small log file. FWIW I regularly run 'pacman -Sc'. I could imagine to 'mv' /var/log/pacman.log to /var/log/pacman.log-2020... if there should be the need to get rid of clutter, such as output of pacman typos, if it one day should become annoying to use search with 'grep'. However, since the file is that small and the complete history could become important, I don't remove it.

On 06/18/2020 02:03 AM, Andy Pieters wrote:

On Thu, 18 Jun 2020 at 07:51, Ralf Mardorf via arch-general < arch-general@archlinux.org> wrote:

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annoying to use search with 'grep'. However, since the file is that small and the complete history could become important, I don't remove it.

Same here, I made some awk scripts to format it but I will never ever delete it. Why would you want to delete a log of what packages were installed and removed?

Thanks Ralf, Andy, I didn't go looking to delete or remove anything. I went to fix grep reporting pacman.log as binary data due to the html/UTF-8 '→' that was written to the log numerous time during the late 2017 - 2018 timeframe. After fixing the log, then I wondered if there was anything I should do with it since it went back to 7 years. Storage isn't an issue: # df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/md1 50G 23G 27G 47% / tmpfs 16G 4.0K 16G 1% /tmp /dev/md0 469M 106M 351M 24% /boot /dev/md2 865G 510G 355G 59% /home /dev/md4 2.7T 945G 1.8T 35% /home/data So for know -- we will just do nothing with it. If push came to shove either writing a quick wrapper to pacman to xz unzip/zip or splitting it by year, or some other sane criteria may be an option. -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.