Tomcat: deleting content of “logs” and “tmp” directories

Question

I have noticed that "logs" and "tmp" content take 36GB and 21GB respectively. I need to free up some disk space and currently wondering is it vise to clean them.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Delete logs older than 7 days.

find tomcat/logs/ -mtime +7 -print0 | xargs -r -0 rm -rf

You probably want to add this as a cronjob too.

Before deleting temp-files, you should make sure that nothing is holding them open.

Answer 2

You should set up tomcat in logrotate properly. Something like this as /etc/logrotate.d/tomcat:

/var/log/tomcat/*.log /var/log/tomcat/*.out {  
 copytruncate  
 daily  
 rotate 7  
 compress  
 missingok
}

tmp you might want to sweep using the find command that pkhamre showed, but I would use logrotate on the log files. You didn't say which distro you're using, but RHEL/CentOS has tmpwatch, which will remove files that haven't been accessed for a defined period of time.