[Solved] Mysql eating my disk space with mystery log files

[techiem2]

So I got the dreaded no space left on device error (again) on my server.
And after poking around, I found that mysql appears to be creating some sort of realtime dump of all transactions.
It's creating a set of /var/lib/mysql/techiem2-bin.000001 files where the number increments on each mysql restart apparently.
There is also a techiem2-bin.index file that just lists them all.
I stopped mysql, moved all the existing ones and the index, and started mysql again and it immediately created a new bin file and index file.

Does anyone know how to disable this strange logging mechanism?
I didn't see anything that looked relevant in the configuration.
I could just setup a cron job to erase them all every night or so, but I'd rather them not be created to begin with.

For perspective, my /var/lib/mysql dir lists at 336M, while the -bin files I moved today list at 2.3G.
And my server only has an 8G hdd...

Thanks.

Mark II

[techiem2]

I found it.
For anyone else who runs into it, there's a directive in the default my.cnf called "log-bin", which, as would be expected, tells it to generate a binary log.