You're at 90%, and you have an app error spewing a few MB of logs per minute. Your on-call engineer /bin/rm's the logs, and instead of going to 30%, you're still at 91%, only the files are gone. Your engineer (rightfully) thinks "maybe the files are still on disk, and there's a filehandle holding the space", so instead of checking /proc to confirm, he bounces the service. Disk stays full, but you've incurred a few seconds of app downtime for no reason, and your engineer is still confused as shit. Your cron job won't kick in for hours? Days? In the mean time, you're still running out of disk, and sooner or later you'll hit 100% and have a real outage.
Cron job is a stupid hack. It doesn't solve any problems that aren't better solved a dozen other ways.
That engineer should have read the documentation. Failing that a `du -a / | sort -n -r` would immediately show the conclusion you jumped to was wrong. Randomly bouncing services on a production machine is a cowboy move.
No documentation, no checklists? That's the source of your problem, not a trash command which moves files rather than deleting them.
Changing the meaning of a decades old command is the problem - du / can take hours to run on some systems, and randomly bouncing shit in prod is the type of cowboy shit that happens in a panic (see gitlab live doc).
Docs and checklists are fine, but at 2am when the jr is on call, you're asking for problems by making rm == mv
You're at 90%, and you have an app error spewing a few MB of logs per minute. Your on-call engineer /bin/rm's the logs, and instead of going to 30%, you're still at 91%, only the files are gone. Your engineer (rightfully) thinks "maybe the files are still on disk, and there's a filehandle holding the space", so instead of checking /proc to confirm, he bounces the service. Disk stays full, but you've incurred a few seconds of app downtime for no reason, and your engineer is still confused as shit. Your cron job won't kick in for hours? Days? In the mean time, you're still running out of disk, and sooner or later you'll hit 100% and have a real outage.
Cron job is a stupid hack. It doesn't solve any problems that aren't better solved a dozen other ways.