Purge Those MySQL Binary Logs

I'm sure this is old hat to real MySQL people, but I'm pretty new to MySQL, especially replication, and our web server is usually pretty quiet, so I was a little surprised when I got a disk space warning because the binary logs had grown so large.

Signing onto the slave server, I ran "show slave status;" at the mysql> prompt to show that the server was reading from the binary log called "mysql-bin.004" on the master.

Logging onto the master, I ran "show master logs;" at the mysql> prompt (show binary logs; is supposed to work but did not - probably a version thing) to display the current logs saved in the mysql/var directory:

mysql> show master logs;
+---------------+
| Log_name |
+---------------+
| mysql-bin.002 |
| mysql-bin.003 |
| mysql-bin.004 |
+---------------+
3 rows in set (0.00 sec)

I then ran the purge master logs command to get rid of the deadwood:

mysql> purge master logs to 'mysql-bin.004';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.02 sec)

mysql> show master logs;
+---------------+
| Log_name |
+---------------+
| mysql-bin.004 |
+---------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

It deleted the big files and we're out of the woods for disk space. I should probably set the max_binlog_size variable a little lower so it creates more, smaller logs so I don't reach a situation where I have a monstrous active log file and no old ones to purge.