VPS: Deleting Core Files - Cleaning up Disk Space

[akreider2]

Are core files regularly deleted (I have a linux VPS), or do I need to setup a cron job or something to delete them?

Are there other temporary files that can be deleted to save disk space?

[JPC-Bilal]

Hi akreider2,

The core files are not deleted automatically so yes, you will have to setup a cron job for it. Regarding temporary files, usually log files take some space in the server that you can check and clear them. Also you can open a ticket with support to check your server and see what is taking up disk space in your server. Thank you.

[JPC-Zishan]

If you want to clear up these core files consuming your disk space then you can use the following command:

find /home/USERNAME -name "core.[0-90-9]*" -type f -print | xargs rm -vf

The above command will search the entire account for any file named core.xxxx and will delete it. Before running this command, I would recommend to first check that what will be deleted. You can check it by running:

find /home/USERNAME -name "core.[0-90-9]*" -type f -print

It will show all the core files present in your account. You should go through the list and if you see that all are core dump files then use the first command to delete all the core dump files to free up the space.

[akreider2]

I found all the core files. I deleted two old ones (from six weeks ago). There are also twelve 89mb files in the / directory which are from today.

My guess is that these are either in use, or maintained/automatically deleted - as I haven't done anything special today that would have created them. They total 1 GB of disk space - which is a lot of my total.

Should I delete them?

[JPC-Zishan]

Core files can be deleted. Basically when any process crashes or get terminated abnormally then kernel dumps the data residing in the memory at that time in to a core file so that it can be debugged later to find the cause of abnormal termination. The detailed and well explained description can be found at Core dumps. Use the “file” command to see what application caused them to be generated. For example:

$ file core.1234

They were most likely the result of a PHP process crashing for some reason that would require further investigation, such as with gdb:

$ gdb /usr/bin/php core.1234