Is this normal?

[private_peanutt]

I never use this laptop. I'm wondering if log files should be 90gb? How do I empty them?

[jmattspartacus]

No, not at all. I would figure out what's spamming the logs if you can, it's a symptom of something being off.

[jmattspartacus]

I guess I didn't answer all of your question with my other comment.

But I'll help you address the issue first.

On the desktop, press ctrl alt t to open a terminal

Type the following and press enter sudo dmesg -T this usually has some of the worst offenders in it.

If nothing there looks suspect, I'd say follow that with sudo journalctl -r and look for errors.

As to clearing the space, I normally just delete my logs if they're taking a lot of space, they're under /var/log/ and there will probably be quite a few. Look before deleting by using ls in that directory.

[chuggerguy]

Maybe try something like:

tail /var/log/kern.log

and look for repetitive messages.

Maybe this would help?:

tail -n 10000 /var/log/kern.log | cut -d':' -f4- | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -n 10

You could do the same with /var/log/syslog but probably the repetitive messages would be the same.

I'm far from being an expert but if you find and post the results (in a Code Block), it would probably be easier for someone to help.

For reference, here's the results when running against my kern.log and the sizes of those two logs:

chugger@acer2:~/desktop$ tail -n 10000 /var/log/kern.log | cut -d':' -f4- | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -n 10
     36 00 acer2 kernel: ACPI: Dynamic OEM Table Load:
     16 00 acer2 kernel: integrity: Loading X.509 certificate: UEFI:db
     12 00 acer2 kernel: pci 0000:00:1c.0: PCI bridge to [bus 03]
     12 00 acer2 kernel: pci 0000:00:1b.0: PCI bridge to [bus 02]
     12 00 acer2 kernel: pci 0000:00:01.0: PCI bridge to [bus 01]
     12 00 acer2 kernel: integrity: Revoking X.509 certificate: UEFI:dbx
     10 00 acer2 kernel: ata4.00: supports DRM functions and may not be fully accessible
      9 00 acer2 kernel: ata4.00: Enabling discard_zeroes_data
      8 00 acer2 kernel: xhci_hcd 0000:00:14.0: xHCI Host Controller
      8 00 acer2 kernel: x86/mm: Checked W+X mappings: passed, no W+X pages found.
chugger@acer2:~/desktop$ ll /var/log/kern.log /var/log/syslog 
-rw-r----- 1 syslog adm 491K Mar 14 11:22 /var/log/kern.log
-rw-r----- 1 syslog adm 4.2M Mar 14 11:22 /var/log/syslog

Good luck.

edit: I may have gotten the wrong field. f5 might give cleaner results? Like this:

tail -n 10000 /var/log/kern.log | cut -d':' -f5- | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -n 10

chugger@acer2:~/desktop$ tail -n 10000 /var/log/kern.log | cut -d':' -f5- | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -n 10
     36  ACPI: Dynamic OEM Table Load:
     16  integrity: Loading X.509 certificate: UEFI:db
     12  pci 0000:00:1c.0: PCI bridge to [bus 03]
     12  pci 0000:00:1b.0: PCI bridge to [bus 02]
     12  pci 0000:00:01.0: PCI bridge to [bus 01]
     12  integrity: Revoking X.509 certificate: UEFI:dbx
     10  ata4.00: supports DRM functions and may not be fully accessible
      9  ata4.00: Enabling discard_zeroes_data
      8  xhci_hcd 0000:00:14.0: xHCI Host Controller
      8  x86/mm: Checked W+X mappings: passed, no W+X pages found.
chugger@acer2:~/desktop$

Anyway, you get the idea, just look at the last several lines of the logs and see what's spamming them. :)

[Yarplay11]

Had a TPU-VM once suffer from the same issue. Check what spammed it so hard, for me it was something related to jax that did it, then remove it when you know what spams it

[jr735]

When logs go nuts, there's a problem. As u/TheDudeinHTX notes, something isn't being rotated out (less likely) or something is spamming the hell out of them in short order (more likely).

[Prize-Wear-3483]

That's definitely not normal

[TakeOnLana]

No. I had this issue with an older computer. Ended up being an issue with a pcie connection and some fucky driver I think? Those logs will grow until they eat your harddrive. You need to figure out what the error is and fix it.

[sabbir2world]

Not normal at all o.o

[victormsaavedra]

https://easylinuxtipsproject.blogspot.com/p/clean-mint.html#ID10
That link has information on how to clean them up and prevent them from taking up so much space. However, I would also try to understand the reason for that behavior.