Large log files and then some more problems

Question

I have a problem that started manifesting itself 2 days ago, when I installed Wine and some game that I've been playing piously for the last 2 days.

The laptop is this one, and Ubuntu is 16.04, fully updated.

So, the first thing is that I got a message: / almost full. I checked it, and I had 2 big syslog files (cca 4GB and 9GB), which were filled by wined3d. The / folder is 20GB, which in my experience has always been more than enough. Also, note the math: 4+9=13GB, which is about right because my normal / is cca 5GB big.

I deleted the two files. Shut down, go to sleep, wake up, turn on, again the same message. So I start the disk usage analyzer and this is where it gets weird:

Devices and locations: / 16,4 GB/19,5 GB - shows as almost full

When I click to see it by folder, the math doesn't add up (this is from du -sh ./*):

13M ./bin
120M    ./boot
4,0K    ./cdrom
352K    ./dev
14M ./etc
199G    ./home
0   ./initrd.img
0   ./initrd.img.old
627M    ./lib
3,9M    ./lib32
4,0K    ./lib64
16K ./lost+found
8,0K    ./media
4,0K    ./mnt
183M    ./opt
du: cannot access './proc/5402/task/5402/fd/4': No such file or directory
du: cannot access './proc/5402/task/5402/fdinfo/4': No such file or directory
du: cannot access './proc/5402/fd/4': No such file or directory
du: cannot access './proc/5402/fdinfo/4': No such file or directory
0   ./proc
56K ./root
du: cannot access './run/user/1000/gvfs': Permission denied
9,7M    ./run
13M ./sbin
4,0K    ./snap
4,0K    ./srv
0   ./sys
32K ./tmp
3,5G    ./usr
277M    ./var
0   ./vmlinuz
0   ./vmlinuz.old

• /home is on a separate partition, the rest of the 1TB drive
• all these cannot access, I checked them by hand, none is larger than 1MB.

So, what's the deal with disk space? I ran autoclean, autoremove, bleachbit... It still shows the same - and I just don't understand what's eating the space. Any help is greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

This is officially solved. The answer was so simple, and yet, I stupidly removed wine and my gamesave in order to regain some disk space to allow Ubuntu to load properly. (I feared that I messed up folder ownership and that user files were saved in root folder).

So... When inserting f.e. a USB into a Linux powered machine, and deleting something on the said USB, Linux creates a folder called Trash1000, where the "deleted" files go.

Apparently, when using sudo Nautilus and deleting something from / folder, it doesn't delete it... it creates a folder Trash-0. A hidden folder - as is on USB. So when I "deleted" my gigantic syslogs, it just moved them to this fabulous folder Trash-0, which doesn't show up anywhere - not in disk analyzer, not in du command, not in bleachbit. It was pure despair why I typed in "ls -a" in terminal.

And instead of emptying Trash-0 on reboot or sth similar, it decided to force in deleted items up to the last byte, using up all the root folder and disabling Ubuntu from loading. Why?

TEST: I decided to recreate the whole thing just to test it. In terminal I created 2 folders, test1 and test2. When removing test1 by "rm -r", no Trash-0 was generated. When removing test2 by sudo nautilus, it generated Trash-0 folder. Never use sudo nautilus! :)

Answer 2

Set aside the space discrepancy for a moment. Shut down wine. Delete the log files. Then disable or reduce the log level for wine. Unless you're trying to trouble shoot or you're looking for something in specific, you'll do exactly what you experienced: chew up disk space.

Here's a link for Wine debugging logs: enable / disable logging

If for some reason you have to leave logging enabled, consider some house keeping at the end of your session by compressing with gzip. You should see a significant size reduction in the logs.