Well, I am an aficianado of this wholesome hobby after an experience today.
A user comes to me and says, "StarOffice won't SAVE! What am I supposed to do?"
Well, her system is on an older computer and there wasn't a great deal of
storage available, and it has one of the WD disks I am rotating out at first
opportunity. I wondered if she had managed to clutter her home directory
enough to make something terrible happen.
Kdiskfree reported in its best full-screen graphic manner that /home was indeed
a long RED bar, without space to create a folder except of course for the
obligatory reserved blocks.
I symlinked a chunk of space out of /usr/local for the user and asked her to
move or delete files she could do without.
She managed to decrease usage from 99 Mb down to 96 Mb in this manner.
Then I looked in a graphic manner and found no large files--none either on a
search except a copy of AIR's iso sitting on ~/Desktop/remotepublic (my
server), nothing in fact over 1 Mb.
Growling low, I opened Konsole, su'ed, and
ls -a -l -R -H ~ | grep ./ -A 1 | lpr
Thank goodness I didn't try to print filenames. There were more than 9000
I paged through the nine sheets of printout and found
./carmen/.netscape/cache
total 288k
>-- #; the offset (>) is mine so I don't get a nasty note from a
# pine user whose client saw all these lines as signature
# and didn't display them.
# so far, so good Netscape Cache is limited to 5000 Kb
# in preferences on her user space.
./carmen/.netscape/cache/00
total 2.6M # HUH?
>--
./carmen/.netscape/cache/01
total 837k
>--
./carmen/.netscape/cache/02
total 3.3M
>--
./carmen/.netscape/cache/03
total 3.4M
>--
*
* # using * for ellipsis for visibility
*
./carmen/.netscape/cache/1F
total 2.6M
>--
All right, technically Netscape didn't violate instructions. 288 in the cache,
and 32 subdirectories of the cache with 7711 files and a combined total of 84
Mb, none individually over 3.8M.
I am stll marveling over this. This is like when 7.0 is a bit slow and I run
top and find lib.ld..... consuming a chunk of memory and 84% CPU and none of
its child netscapes even a process in the system... An event which seems to be
on a weekly frequency. So I kill it and the system is fine and netscape starts
up well the next time.....
But this interesting Netscape dodge is a new one on me. To cure it, I went to
the file manager, saved ~/.netscape/archive for later analysis and then deleted
~/.netscape (which is automatically recursive without asking in kfm).
Now the user is back to about 11% usage in the home directory, and I will be
looking in with Webmin from time to time, hoping I can get some insight into
how that happened.
Anyone else have a similar experience?
Civileme
