sysblogd

The other day I noticed that my settings directory (/etc) uses over 13 MB of my hard drive. So I wandered which package (I’m using a Debian based package managed system) makes the settings directory grow so large. After a couple of trails and errors I came up with the following sequence of commands:

$ du -h --max-depth=1 /etc 2> /dev/null | egrep '(^[5-9][0-9]{2}K)|M'
692K    /etc/X11
672K    /etc/acpi
712K    /etc/xdg
2.1M    /etc/brltty
500K    /etc/ssl
528K    /etc/mono
20K     /etc/NetworkManager
13M     /etc
$ dpkg -S '/etc/brltty'
brltty-x11, brltty: /etc/brltty
$ apt-cache show brltty | grep -A5 'Description'
Description: Access software for a blind person using a soft braille terminal
BRLTTY is a daemon which provides access to the Linux console (text mode)
for a blind person using a soft braille display.  It drives the braille
terminal and provides complete screen review functionality.
The following display models are supported:
* Alva (ABT3xx/Delphi)

Fortunatelly, I’m not blind so I could remove brltty with aptitude which then suggested to remove dependencies, too.

References:

• Regex reference
• Resources for advanced Ubuntu topics, eg. how to remove …-desktop meta packages with apt-get (instead of aptitude), secure networking setup, etc.