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A 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

  • bizdelnick@lemmy.ml
    166·
    1 year ago

    You don’t have to clean your ~/.cache every now and then. You have to figure out which program eats so much space there, ensure that it is not misconfigured and file a bugreport.

    • redd
      261·
      1 year ago

      So OP’s headline should be saying instead: Reminder to CHECK your ~/.cache folder every now and then

      • bizdelnick@lemmy.ml
        21·
        1 year ago

        Check? Why?

        % du -sh ~/.cache
1,6G    /home/bizdelnick/.cache

        I don’t remember if I ever cleaned it up. Probably a couple years ago when I moved my old HDD to new PC with freshly installed OS. It does not grow accidentally. Only in some very rare cases. As well as some other dirs under ~ and var. If it is a critical system, set up monitoring of free filesystem space. If not, you will notice if it becomes full (I can’t remember when this happened to me last time, maybe ~15 years ago when some log file started to grow because of endless error messages).

        • redd
          7·
          1 year ago

          Because some users experienced accidential grows like OP had 160 Gbyte. So general advice for linux users can be stated as: Check your ~/.cache every now and then

          Critical systems/servers shall better be monitored as you suggest.

          • bizdelnick@lemmy.ml
            51·
            1 year ago

            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.

            • reddEnglish
              3·
              1 year ago

              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.

              • bizdelnick@lemmy.ml
                11·
                1 year 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.