[Techtalk] Making room for Oracle

[Maria Blackmore]

Hello

On Tue, 26 Nov 2002, Telsa Gwynne wrote:

> > If you want to try and find some more space without reinstalling, you
> > can look for big packages that you don't use. Run something like
> > 
> > 	rpm -qa --queryformat "%10{SIZE} %20{NAME}\n" | sort -rn
> 
> Wow! I would add "| less" or " > filename" at the end. Without
> this, unless you have a massive scrollback, the real biggies will
> scroll off the top of the screen and out of scrollback.

Also, if you just wish to look for large files, which may not neccesarily
have been installed with a package, such as data files in your home
directory, you can use "du" to print the space usage of files.

Something I use frequently is "du -hs *", which will give a summary in
human readable format of all the files and directories in the current
directory (du will give usage for any files given on the command line)

In a similar vein to the above, you can use it without the -h option, and
then run it through "sort -rn" with a pipe as above, as Telsa suggested,
possibly with the aid of "less"

> I have absolutely no idea how I would recover from deleting glibc.
> About the only program I can think of which is -not- linked against it
> is 'sash': a stand-alone shell which is statically linked specifically
> for those occasions when you manage to delete some vital library.

I haven't used sash, but does it provide built in utilities too, for those
moments when you realise that although you now have a shell, you can't
actually *do* anything :)

> I don't go as far as those people who make it the default root shell.
> But I do always put it on the machine. Just in case!

It's a good idea, yes.

Personally, I use busybox as well, which is a little happy multi-call
binary originally intended to be used on embedded systems and a mere 150
kB :)

When you run it, you can either give it its current function as the first
argument, or it looks at argv[0] to see what it's running as.  It's great
for recovering mostly dead machines, since it includes almost everything
apart from an actual shell.  Including things like init, ifconfig, mount
:)


have fun

Maria