Spring is almost upon us again. With spring comes the usual yearly cleaning that just gets so deep that it doesn’t happen any other time of year. The same thing should go for your computer. Over the year we’ve tested new software, saved copious amounts of web cache, stored various amounts of pictures and other files to the hard disk, on our Linux machines, we probably only booted our computers once anyway and so there are countless numbers of kernels and other system packages that maybe haven’t been applied. There is also the developer’s computer that may have all these extra files laying around from where he tried to solve a specific problem in a program and had to try various scenarios to get around it… No? Must be me then. All these things may or may not be needed now and so it’s a good idea to clear those out of the way to make room for new ones. In this, I stress the idea of making occasional home directory backups as well as a few of the commands that I use to clean my system, this is part 1, part 2 will deal more with cleaning inside the case. If you’re squeemish, that one may not be for you.
STEP 1
This step is quite simple.You first need to backup any data you don’t want to risk losing. This includes family photos, beats, personal documents and pretty much anything found in your home folder. To create a backup of your home directory just run the following:
sudo rsync -aAXv –delete –exclude={“/home/*/.cache”,”/home/*/.thumbnails”,”/home/*/.local/share/Trash”} ~/$USER/ path to backup directory
This should back up everything except the cache folder, the thumbnails folder and the trash folder. Pretty straight forward and then you’re done.
STEP 2
When cleaning your system, it’s important to start with the cached data and thumbnails that are not important to the system at all. The .cache folder is usually found in the home directory. This could account for upwards of 1 to 50 gigs depending on when you actually cleaned it out last. To clean this debris, we use the following commands:
sudo rm -r ~/$USER/.cache/*
sudo rm -r ~/$USER/.thumbnails/*
This will clean most of the junk data that we no longer need by itself. This does not clean browser history or cookies, if you want to clean those stay tuned. Next step will take care of the trash folder that is also located in the home directory.
STEP 3
Cleaning trash files is another important step, sometimes we can have trash that’s over a year old because we forget to clean it and the system never says anything, often it goes unnoticed. Often times when we “delete” a file, it gets placed there anyway. Removing this could save you a boatload of space. To clean this we use the following command:
sudo rm -r ~/.local/share/Trash/*
This will clean all relevant data in your home’s trash disposal. This is a great way to free up some potential gigs, but that’s not all, we have a few other steps on the way.
STEP 4
In this step, we try to clean out package cache. This is one of the biggest places to retain data and grow to enormous sizes. This is the cache that stores older versions of software. Most packages get built in the /tmp directory so we will clean there next. In this step we go over possible solutions for both Ubuntu-based and Arch-based distributions. This is dependent upon your current package management solution. To clean this area we use the following commands:
Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get autoremove
sudo apt-get autoclean
sudo apt-get clean
While this next one has multiple options, we will give you and example of each.
Manjaro/Antergos/Arch:
sudo pacman -rvk3
#This removes all but the latest three versions
sudo pacman -Sc
#This removes all but the latest version
sudo pacman -Scc
#This removes all versions
I have scripts that will handle this for you, but it’s important to learn which ones to use and when. For the most part, in Arch you probably only want to leave the latest three versions as this allows you to revert back later, but this isn’t always practical as package cache can take a lot of disk space, so when you are spring cleaning, I recommend using the second option. But this is still up to you.
STEP 5
When you’re cleaning the package cache anyway, it’s also important to clear orphaned packages. These are packages that are no longer connected to any dependencies and are usually no longer needed. These can add up if you’ve never cleaned them before. Ubuntu has a separate application you can install to do this, I will go over that here, Manjaro’s package manager can do that for you if you run a certain command. The easiest way to do this in Ubuntu would be to install gtkorphan which my scripts will include in the install list shortly. To do this in Manjaro and any distribution relying on pamac simply run the following:
sudo pacman -Rs –noconfirm $(pacman -Qqdt)
That is that!
STEP 6
This is the final step on this list, this will scan for broken symlinks and what I call shadow files in the home directory. These files and soft links are almost never needed. To do this run the following commands:
find -xtype l -delete
find $HOME -type f -name “*~” -print -exec rm {} \;
Stay tuned for part 2 of this cleanup tutorial, this concludes part 1.
Link to scripts: https://github.com/jackrabbit335/UsefulLinuxShellScripts
