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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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I don't think I've ever seen .cache get bigger than 10GB
It looks like yay was storing AUR build files there, that folder took up about 160 of the 164GiB
You can use
yay -Scto clean the cache. It'll also ask you if you want to clean the pacman cache, which I'm assuming you also haven't cleaned (check the size of/var/cache/pacman).One would just need to modify the pacman cache hook for yay. I'm too lazy tho.
You should try using paru, might be better off with it.
it doesn't matter if you use paru, yay or heck makepkg if you are compiling packages with hilariously large sources like for example webbrowser (librewolf, brave, ungoogled-chromium, firedragon take each like ~30 GB) without pruning the build cache afterwards
Something I noticed was that in this case it was mostly binary AUR programs taking up the space.
I think maybe since yay/AUR use cloned git repos, and old versions of binaries get stored in the git diff and then add up because different versions of the binary are basically like keeping multiple copies of it instead of just the changes to the source code.
Paru cache is huge and you have to delete it manually with something like paru -Sc i think
My update script handles mirrors, updates and cleans the cache automatically. I'd definitely recommend creating one. It's aliased to sysupdate for me and I also check if it's a debian or arch based distro so the command works on my servers and desktop
I highly recommend topgrade. You can add custom commands so clearing paru's cache shouldn't be a problem. I just do it by hand as I'm ok with it.
I've heard of tools like that, but this works fine for me. This way I'm not dependent on it being packaged for my distro and having to install it through other means. I'm fine running things manually, this is just for convenience
What is your update script? Where did you post it?
I don't think I've posted it before, but here it is. If you use different utilities you'd have to swap those out. Also excuse the comments, I had GH Copilot generate this script
If it is true, it is a bug in yay. Cashe should not grow without limit.
It was reported twice as minimum. Seems that author does not care.
Shouldn't it store that stuff in data-home or state-home? Pikaur compiles in cache and stores it in data-home after.
Depends on the distributions and default settings. In arch, by default, pacman doesn't delete cache.
Pacman's cache isn't in ~/.cache though, it's in /var/cache. So whatever is taking up this much space isn't the package manager.
That being said, I think the arch devs should add a config option to automatically delete old packages without having to run paccache manually and have it default to the last 2 versions of a package or so. It can grow quite big over time.
You can set a hook to do it automatically or use this, but I agree that this should be default behaviour
You can also just do
systemctl enable paccache.timerto automatically run paccache once a week.