Roy J. Tellason, Sr. wrote: > So I'm poking around with mc, and happened across /var/cache/apt/archives > which has a LOT of *.deb files in it, and which seems to include many > versions of the same package, some of them many years old, going all the > way back to 2013. I guess I've been running debian a little longer than I'd > thought... > > Is it okay to just delete older versions of these files? Or should I be > doing something using one of the package management tools? I've mostly used > synaptic, but am also aware of apt-get, apt, aptitude, and am not real > clear on their comparative capabilities.
"apt clean" will wipe it all out safely; if you need them, they will be downloaded again. Or you can remove .deb files by hand, but... > I'm looking at over 7500 files amounting to over 9.5GB. That's a lot. > I also see /var/cache/dictionaries-common, which appears to be tied to a > spelling checker, which I don't use here. And /var/cache/samba, which I > also don't use -- there isn't a windoze machine around here at all. On the machine I'm on now, dictionaries-common is a whopping 48KB, and the samba cache is 16KB. Do you have any actual data in there? > What's the best way to get all of this excess stuff out of the system? In general, files sitting in /var/cache can be deleted, and the worst that should happen is that they will be re-downloaded or recreated or not be available when you end up wanting them. It's like /tmp but longer-lived. The directory structures should remain intact until purged by removal of the packages that put them there. -dsr-
