HELP! • Runaway Log Files!!•

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Last night I got that annoying "Your Startup Disk is Almost Full" alert.

This puzzled me as I had previously freed up over 8 GB's only hours earlier. I deleted an expendable 100 MB file and nothing changed. My available disk space still read at Zero K available.

I searched the net and found this thread. http://forums.macosxhints.com/archive/index.php/t-29799.html
And while the problem discussed therein is not identical, it did provide me with a few command line tips and a general area to begin my search. In the terminal i typed:

sudo du -hx -d 1 /

but instead of bloated swap files, I found my problem; a 33 GB log folder. More specifically, 1 33 GB log file within that directory: system.log.0

I waffled for a moment or 2, then zapped it.

rm system.log.0

All seemed well, after a reboot I suddenly had my hard disk space back.

Now fast forward to this evening. My system had been on all day sleeping as it usually does. Suddenly I notice the "Startup Disk is Almost Full" alert again. I went right to my terminal and typed :

cd /private/var/log

sudo du -s -h *

And a now I had another bloated log file : system.log

I planning on deleting this file, but I do not know if I am simply making more trouble for me down the road by deleting these files. Also, I need to know why this is happening in the first place.

it should be noted the following:

Powerbook 17 1.33G4 with half a gig of ram. Was just brought up to 10.3.8 from 10.3.7
 
cocktail did not work.

First I deleted rotating log files,..nothing changed. Then I clicked "manage logs" and cocktail crashed.

So I can manually delete the file. But is it ok to do so? Furthermore,..what the hell is causing this?
 
Something (the iShock driver, I suppose) is spewing out errors to your system log. If you open up Console (/Applications/Utilities/Console), you can read whatever's in the system.log. You'll probably see something logging an error in intervals of less than a second apart - probably the same message over and over.

You'll probably have to remove the iShock driver, if that's what is causing the messages. No other way to make it stop, unfortunately.
 
Followup

So I followed the directions on
http://www.macally.com/techsupport/drivers.html
everything worked fine except the console directions. Console kept hanging everytime I clicked on system logs. I resorted to manuallly deleting the file. A reboot later and all once again seems well.

However, system.log (and system.log.0) seem gone from my system forever. I hoped they would regenerate themselves,...but alas they did not. Is this bad? Should I try to replace those files from backups?
 
Nope. Don't worry, they will come back in time. Now, you should think of some cron maintenance. Cron is a unix line program that runs in the background every night (if the computer is running). There is a nice article about cron. Now, since most Mac users either sleep or shut off their Macs at night, there are many freeware/shareware programs out in the wild (just go to VersionTracker or Macupdate and search for cron) to get a prpgram to run these maintenance scripts. I personally like one trick ponies that do just one task only so I use MacJanitor.
 
Another approach would be to use anacron - basically it's a cron that doesn't expect your computer to be on all the time. Instead of requiring a job to run at a certain time (or miss the boat altogether), it requires it to run within the last (day, week, month, whatever)
 
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