can I delete the files in the proc folder without consequence?

Question

I see my proc folder getting bigger and bigger and I have limitation in terms of number of files.

Can I delete those files or will it have consequences?

thanks

Solution

You can not delete them since they are not files.

/proc is mounted using the procFS, which is not a real filesystem. Instead the contents are generated the moment you try to read from them. This also means it is not using any disk space at all. (So there is no reason in trying to delete it).

Comments

[Spence]

+1 - rm -rf /proc/* Heh heh... Don't do that.

[Hennes]

Heh, why not. Might be fun what failure message you get :)