On Tue, Jan 11, 2022 at 01:25:27PM -0500, 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.
>
"aptitude clean" will delete all the archived .deb files. I use this one when I'm hurting for drive space, and don't foresee a need to reinstall any of the packages.
"aptitude autoclean" will delete all the no-longer-downloadable archived .deb files. I use this one when I want to tidy up the machine, but think that maybe I might want to reinstall one of the packages and won't have a working network connection at that time. If I'm not worried about dwindling drive space, this is the one I use every few "aptitude full-upgrade"s.
I believe apt-get and apt have the same options.