Delete the 500 Oldest Files in a Directory (Oracle DBA)

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Delete the 500 Oldest Files in a Directory (Oracle DBA)

Purpose

Oracle's diagnostic destination (DIAGNOSTIC_DEST), audit file destination (AUDIT_FILE_DEST, also known as adump), and per-process trace directories collect thousands of small files over time. Inode counts, not bytes, are usually the limit that bites first — many filesystems cap directory entries or per-filesystem inodes well below the disk's byte capacity. The one-liner below — taken straight from the shutdownabort.com DBA Quick Guides (Andrew Barry, 2007–2013, preserved via the Wayback Machine as the anchor source for this post) — deletes the 500 oldest files in the current directory in one shot. It is the quickest way to free up enough headroom to keep the database running while a longer-term retention strategy is put in place.

List Files Opened by an Oracle Process with lsof -p

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

List Files Opened by an Oracle Process with lsof -p

Purpose

lsof (LiSt Open Files) is the UNIX tool for inspecting which processes have which files open. For an Oracle DBA it is the fastest answer to four common questions: which datafiles is this server process touching, which trace file is PMON writing into right now, why is df reporting more space used than du, and which library is the database currently mapped against. The one-liner below — taken straight from the shutdownabort.com DBA Quick Guides (Andrew Barry, 2007–2013, preserved via the Wayback Machine as the anchor source for this post) — is the smallest possible invocation: list every file held open by one process, identified by its PID.

Oracle Administration Unix on Oracle Scripts

Delete the 500 Oldest Files in a Directory (Oracle DBA)