Re: freeing up some space
Roy J. Tellason, Sr. wrote:
> So I'm poking around with mc, and happened across /var/cache/apt/archives which has a LOT of *.deb files in it, and which seems to include many versions of the same package, some of them many years old, going all the way back to 2013. I guess I've been running debian a little longer than I'd thought...
>
> Is it okay to just delete older versions of these files? Or should I be doing something using one of the package management tools? I've mostly used synaptic, but am also aware of apt-get, apt, aptitude, and am not real clear on their comparative capabilities.
"apt clean" will wipe it all out safely; if you need them, they
will be downloaded again.
Or you can remove .deb files by hand, but...
> I'm looking at over 7500 files amounting to over 9.5GB.
That's a lot.
> I also see /var/cache/dictionaries-common, which appears to be tied to a spelling checker, which I don't use here. And /var/cache/samba, which I also don't use -- there isn't a windoze machine around here at all.
On the machine I'm on now, dictionaries-common is a whopping 48KB, and the
samba cache is 16KB. Do you have any actual data in there?
> What's the best way to get all of this excess stuff out of the system?
In general, files sitting in /var/cache can be deleted, and the
worst that should happen is that they will be re-downloaded or
recreated or not be available when you end up wanting them. It's
like /tmp but longer-lived. The directory structures should
remain intact until purged by removal of the packages that put
them there.
-dsr-
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