this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
425 points (96.9% liked)

Linux

48363 readers
975 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Alt TextA screenshot of a file manager preview window for my ~/.cache folder, which takes up 164.3 GiB and has 246,049 files and 15,126 folders. The folder was first created about 1.75 years ago with my system

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Some users experienced accidential growth of /var/log. Some users experienced accidential growth of /var/cache. Some users experienced accidential growth of /var/lib. Some users experienced accidential growth of ~/.xsession-errors. Shall I continue?

Does every user need to begin his day checking all that places? No, he does not. It is waste of time. Such situations are extremely rare. If you are paranoid, check df to see if you have enough free space, and only if it unpredictably shrinked begin to ivestigate which directory has grown.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I don't get your point. Why should somebody do this every day?

As the experience from other users in this thread, it seems not extremely rare to have an overgrown ~/.cache/ folder. So checking it from time to time is a good advice. If we all do this for a time, and create bug tickets for software which is not cleaning up. Then this problem will hopefully go away with future software releases.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago

Why should somebody do this every day?

Why should somebody do this ever?

As the experience from other users in this thread, it seems not extremely rare to have an overgrown ~/.cache/ folder.

It is the first thread about overgrown ~/.cache directory I see since I use Linux (~16 years or so). But, as I wrote above, this sometimes (rarely) happens with log files and some other directories. Checking each of them is a waste of time, if not automated, checking just one or few of them makes sense only if you are testing some app and looking for files it creates.