running out of space in /usr (rambling)

[Lowell Gilbert]

Joel Rees <joel at alpsgiken.gr.jp> writes:

> I originally gave /usr 2G, and I just recently tried to install perl 5.8.
> It ran out of space in three places, so I started cleaning /usr up. It
> was up to 83%, then I did a make clean in php4 and several other places,
> and got it down to 78%. 

You probably have other cruft around, but with the disk space there
anywhere, it's not worth worrying about.

> So, I used disklabel to allocate the rest of the 10G slice fBSD is
> living in to a new partition and disklable gave it the letter "d".
> 
> (Why doesn't disklabel give out "d" in sequence? I think I read
> something once, but I don't remember, can't find it in a casual glance
> through the FAQ.)

'c' is reserved for the whole disk, for historical reasons.

> Anyway, I told disklabel to mount the "d" partition as /usr/prod, did 
> 
>     sudo cp -Rp /usr/ports /usr/prod
>     sudo rm -R /usr/ports
>     sudo mkdir /usr/ports
> 
> Then I edited /etc/fstab, adding a line for the "d" drive and setting it
> to mount at /usr/ports. Rebooted and it _looks_ like I'm okay. (Actually,
> /usr is only down to 53%, so I'm probably going to use fdisk to give the
> other 10G I was saving for a rainy day to fBSD, reformat the whole thing,
> and re-install, using this as an excuse to go to 4.8-STABLE.)

Reducing the number of partitions may be an appropriate approach for
your (desktop, it appears) situation.

> Question -- Is cp -Rp the recommended way to move the contents of a
> subdirectory to a new partition? Even though I'm the only user on the
> machine, I should have done the copying in single-user mode, right?

Single-user mode isn't really necessary with no other users, as long
as you're not running any major daemons.  Some other methods would be
faster, and backup/restore would correctly handle any flags or links
you had there, but it's quite possible none of this applies to your
situation.  

> And one more, is the limit of 8 partitions in an fdisk slice every going
> away?

If I remember correctly, it's just a compile-time constant...