mkfs has an option to reserve a %age or # of blocks/inodes for root of a file system. It's the file system equivalent of empty files. Usually when free space i

mkfs has an option to reserve a %age or # of blocks/inodes for root of a file system. It's the file system equivalent of empty files. Usually when free space is exhausted, it's for non-root users. You get that same "time to fix stuff by deleting the file" by using tunefs to change that root reserved space to zero. Plus have /var/log on a separate file system and make sure that your log rotations are based on size as well as time.