Due to some reason, my /var/log/syslog had grown over 500MB. Since I have /var mounted to a separate partition I noticed it easily. I had never had such an issue, so I googled around and found this very old post. Decided to give it a try and just renamed the file and restarted syslog as it says:

mv /var/log/syslog{,.`date +%Y-%m-%d`}

And then:

kill -HUP `cat /var/run/syslogd.pid`

I saved the old syslog to another partition so I can check it later (still haven’t done it) and see what the problem was.

I just want to make it very clear, that I do not know if this is harmless.

So far I don’t seem to have any issues.