I needed to make some more free space in the /var partition on a Linux system and found that the largest file in /var/log was the messages file, which had grown to 75 MB, because it was no longer being rotated. I moved the current messages file to another partition and then used
/etc/init.d/syslog restart, which restarts
syslogd, which was the process that had the messages file open. Restarting
syslogd leads to the creation of a new messages file
