Clearing old Rails logs

8 September 2012

When developing Rails apps, the logs tend to subtly grow without being checked. On one machine I freed up 10GB of disk space just by clearing old Rails development and test logs.

If you’re like me, you probably have most of your projects sitting in a Code or Projects directory in your home. You probably tail -f the log file once every now and again, but don’t really need to keep the entire log file around.

Here’s a shell command that will go through every project in the ~/Code directory and clear out old log files.

find ~/Code -type d -iname log -maxdepth 2 | xargs -I% find % -type f -iregex ".*log$" | xargs rm

I’ve got this command aliased to rmlogs in my zshrc as well.