Is it safe to delete the log file at /private/var/log/vnetlib?

[MacSheep]

[Fusion 4.1.2 / Lion 10.7.4]

My vnetlib log file is over 22MB in size and has >250K lines of entries going back to Sept, 2011. Is it safe to delete this log file? Was planning to safe boot, delete the file, and then do a restart immediately after to restart the VMWare networking components -- and hopefully recreate a new blank file. I tried clearing the contents of the file via Terminal but do not have sufficient permissions, even with sudo -- guessing this was because the VMWare networking processes were running at the time.

Thanks,

John

[WoodyZ · Accepted solution]

If you're not having any networking issues then it's safe to delete.

I had no problem deleting it in a Terminal (while VMware Fusion was running) using the following command (although I would recommend closing VMware Fusion first and it does not need to be done from Safe Mode).

sudo rm -f /var/log/vnetlib

Just curious, what the big deal is why you want to delete it,  22 MB is not that big a deal.

[MacSheep]

Thanks, WoodyZ. Followed your instruction and when I relaunched my VM, I saw the file was recreated... now at a slightly more reasonable 25k!

John

[WoodyZ]

Yes 25 K is much more reasonable, mine was 17.5 MB.  IMO If VMware wants to maintain an ongoing vnetlib log then they should archive it once in a while like the system.log gets archived.  My 17.5 MB zipped is only 140 KB.