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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.

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Reminder to clear your ~/.cache folder every now and then (lemmy.world)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [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.