On Thu, 30 Dec 2021 at 18:21, Fred fred.fredex@gmail.com wrote:
Is it safe to just remove files from /var/cache on a running system, or is there a correct procedure for doing that?
Mine has hit over 3 gigs, making it one of the larger directories in /, which is running low on space. I've hit all the low-hanging fruit I can find and now I come to things like /var/cache, and I don't know what to do about such.
The first step is to find out what is using it. It is probably dnf but could be other utilities which are trying and failing to do something. I start off with
``` $ sudo -i # cd /var/cache # du -sch | sort -h 0 ./PackageKit 0 ./app-info 0 ./bpf 0 ./fwupd 0 ./httpd 0 ./krb5rcache 0 ./libX11 0 ./libvirt 0 ./private 0 ./realmd 36K ./ldconfig 1.7M ./man 29M ./dnf 31M total
while on a different system: 4.0K ./abrt-di 4.0K ./bpf 4.0K ./foomatic 4.0K ./krb5rcache 4.0K ./private 4.0K ./realmd 8.0K ./httpd 8.0K ./libX11 8.0K ./powertop 96K ./ldconfig 300K ./ibus 520K ./libvirt 3.5M ./man 4.2M ./fwupd 38M ./app-info 59M ./cups 213M ./PackageKit 332M ./dnf 2.1G ./mock 2.7G total
```
As others have noted, dnf is probably the most used tool here, but it could be mock or some other utility (I had cups because I misconfigured something once)
dnf is a tricky tool because sometimes a command will create a 'not-so-temporary' cached tree which can't be cleaned because `dnf clean all` doesn't know it. What I do is a `dnf clean all` and then go into /var/cache/dnf and see what else might be still there. In my case I found a large trove of packages from when I had enabled testing at one point and then turned it off before doing a clean. I normally just delete all the directories and do a `dnf update` to see if it reports errors.
Hope this helps.
Thanks in advance!
Fred _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos