[CentOS] question on unused directories in /usr/lib and /usr/lib64

[Craig Thompson]

Hardly kidding.  But then again, this is early April isn't it?  Oh, wait...

To "cleanly uninstall unused software," one would need a list of what software is ON the system which is unused.  Doing a "minimal" install pretty much gives you a system which no one can use.  Doing the classic "server" install loads a lot of this junk which no one ever uses.  As someone opined on this list, "Why does CentOS install bluetooth packages???"   I don't want it on my server.  I'm trying to find out what the commonly UNUSED packages are so they can be removed.

I randomly selected one package "pango" and found it had about 200 dependencies and uninstalled it.  Lucky?  But I'm sure there are more.  

And nowhere do I recall proposing a mass hysteria approach of "rm -R -f /" ...

Can you help in this?  If so, I would welcome your input.


On Feb 15, 2012, at 3:51 PM, Alexander Dalloz wrote:

> Am 15.02.2012 21:30, schrieb Craig Thompson:
>> I was working on archiving an old virtual server today and was reminded of how much space is wasted by some of the default installations on CentOS.  I think this was a 5.x box.
>> 
>> Anyway, in /usr/lib/64 (and probably /usr/lib on non-64 systems), there were a lot of directories which have no bearing on a basic server.  I saw firefox, openoffice and many, many other directories -- replete with enough files to seriously affect backup space over time.
>> 
>> Does anyone have an available script or list of commands for removing most or all of these "generally unused" directories, packages or whatever they are?
>> 
>> I found something a while back for shutting off unused services, but this seems to be a gaping hole in available archives.
>> 
>> Thanks.
>> 
>> CT
> 
> You are kidding, are you?
> 
> Uninstall unused / unnecessary software cleanly using using yum (or
> rpm). *Don't* randomly delete filesystem structures you think they are
> pointless or wasting harddrive space.
> 
> Alexander
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