/var/log. Why is it important?

[cylix]

I'm embaraced to say I have been using Linux as my full time OS since 1997 and I still don't see or understand that there is much importance in /var/log stuff. The only time I look at it is when I'm having a problem and since I'm a single user its not I'm not as worried about security as I should be. My question is what are the logs in /var/log good for? This question comes because I was thinking of mounting it as tmpfs so it would be cleared out every boot. I found that the directory had some files in it that were over 100meg namely acpid and wlog so I wanted to clear it out every shutdown with the (possibly) mistaken Idea I don't need them. Any help in understanding the usefulness of the logging other than debugging is very wellcome.

Thanks

[Deathwing00]

Moved from Installing Gentoo to Other Things Gentoo.

[Nil_Spaar]

The stuff in /var/log is only for you. If you don't look at your logs you could as well delete them without your system taking any damage (afaik). But there are also programms that do usefull things with the log files. Afaik the regenworld script for example uses /var/log/emerge.log to regenerate your world file. Genlop can use that log to estimated the time for future emerges.
Therefore wiping the logs on every reboot might be a little extrem. If you ever come to a situation where you need to know what happened to your system a week ago you will regret it (Just like backups: you miss them only when it's already too late
If you simply want to cut down on disk usage you might want to take a look at logrotate.

[crudh]

And if there are some logs you whish to keep and some you don't, then configure the applications not to log or symlink the logs to /dev/null

[cylix]

Danke and tack själv mycket for the replies. I'm looking into logrotate and hadn't thought of /dev/null so Thanks for your help.