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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
this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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This particular folder caches many things from various package managers. Won't hurt to clear, but will fill up again. Maybe consider not using caches when engaging such things.
Can hurt to clear, there's a lot more than just package managers using it
It's a cache folder. Created by the distro. They labelled it as such because it's cache, and can be considered ephemeral. It won't do any permanent damage to anything unless you've accidentally been using it for something else.
How?
Depends on the package manager. Check options for whatever you're running.
Package managers don't use this directory as well as any other subdirectory of user's home.
Could have fooled me, because it's certainly the default for things like brew, flatpak, mpm, and pip. Looks like npm and maven use it on certain Debian based distros as well. I'm betting more of the immutable distros use that directory as well vs something in /var/cache.
Ah, sorry, I thought about system package managers like apt, dnf, zypper etc.