Arch Linux

jmags

Member

Registered: 2006-03-07

Posts: 48

Hard-drive housekeeping

I just removed a bunch of xorg drivers that were installed by the Arch CD, but that didn't apply to my computer. The thing is, after I was done removing them, Conky shows that I am using MORE space on my / partition than I was before. This seems a little counterintuitive. I just used pacman -R, could things be archived somewhere? If so, how can I get rid of them?

Ibex

Member

Registered: 2006-03-02

Posts: 135

Re: Hard-drive housekeeping

There is the pacman cache. That's a place where all packages you ever installed are kept. That's nice when some new package fails so you can install that old one in the cache again so your computer is running smooth again. But, It can actually fill some space on the harddisk.

If you're sure your computer is working fine with the current packages, you can safetly remove your old packages by using the command:

pacman -Scc

But like you said, It's not "normal" that you're using more space after removing packages. However, I have to say that I prefer pacman -Rs above pacman -R. From the manpage:

REMOVE OPTIONS
              (...)
              -s, --recursive
              For  each  target specified, remove it and all its dependencies,
              provided that (A) they are not required by other  packages;  and
              (B) they were not explicitly installed by the user.  This option
              is analagous to a backwards --sync operation.
              (...)

jmags

Member

Registered: 2006-03-07

Posts: 48

Re: Hard-drive housekeeping

-Scc was the first thing I thought of, too, but it didn't make a difference. Strange.

jaboua

Member

Registered: 2005-11-05

Posts: 634

Re: Hard-drive housekeeping

It doesn't remove files from ABS/AUR - remove the files in /var/cache/pacman/src/ too.

Also, there are a few apps that can graphically show where most of the space is used, you might try some of them. I belive filelight is the name of the KDE one, but I also tried a GTK app with a name I don't remember that does the same. I found filelight better though, as it uses sector diagrams... You should try it.

jmags

Member

Registered: 2006-03-07

Posts: 48

Re: Hard-drive housekeeping

The only folder I have in /var/cache/pacman is pkg, and it's empty. To make this all a little weirder, there seems to be more data on my drive now (having just started up) than there was when I shut the computer down last.

Snowman

Developer/Forum Fellow

From: Montreal, Canada

Registered: 2004-08-20

Posts: 5,212

Re: Hard-drive housekeeping

It's possible that conky didn't had time to update his stats.
BTW, do you have /usr or /var on seperate partitions? If yes, it would explain why the space on / didn't decrease when you removed the packages.
If you don't like the KDE dependency for filelight, you could try  xdiskusage instead.