can I delete .debs?

[rudar]

I seem to have about 100MB of .deb files sitting under /sw/fink, and would like to release some disk space for more important things (er, well, maybe just for Warcraft, but still...) AFAIK, the .deb files are used during installation, and fink keeps them around to save the effort of re-downloading and re-compiling them if/ when I need to rebuild a package with different options or whatever. If that's the case, there should be no problem deleting these files (along with the ones in /sw/src) Or have I misunderstood?

[sao]

rudar,


If you just want to clean up the /sw/src folder of some packages then, the easiest way to do it is to use 'emacs' in dired mode.

"You can use OSX's /usr/bin/emacs:

sudo /usr/bin/emacs /sw/src

It goes into dired mode automatically. You go down the list of files and directories, you flag the files you want to get rid of by hitting "d" and the directories hitting "m". After the selection, you hit "x" to delete the files and "!" then "rm -rf" to delete the directories. Takes you less than 5 minutes even for a very populated and long neglected /sw/src directory."

Or you could manually go thru the dirs and delete the files you don't need anymore. A lot of work if you want to clean everything, but you can save lots of space.

If you would really need the all the space, you could delete everything from /sw/src.

So, if you really need to wipe *all* source files, you can just do a:

sudo rm -rf /sw/src/*

But, you should keep in mind that if you do that, you will have to redownload all sources if you ever need to rebuild the package in question.

Likewise, you could delete all *.deb files in your /sw heirarchy without ill effect, other than possibly needing to rebuild things later. They don't affect anything at runtime. Then, I would use one of the following commands:

sudo find /sw -name "*.deb" -exec rm {} \;

or,

sudo find /sw -name '*.deb' -exec /bin/rm -- {} \;

The single quotes suppress sh/ksk/bash/ filename expansion.

Full path to known good rm.

'--' prevents rm from misinterpreting filenames which begin with a
dash.

If you use use /sw/fink as your target directory, it should make things go a bit quicker (and is less typing than "/sw/fink/debs /sw/fink/dists").

But again remember, if you uninstall a package and want to reinstall it later, you will have to rebuild it from scratch since you deleted the .deb files.

You can also clean up the symlink list in /sw/fink/debs.

Although it doesn't free a lot of space, you can get rid of broken symlinks sitting around.

If you use bash you can run:

for DEB in /sw/fink/debs/*.deb ; do (file $DEB |grep broken) && sudo rm
$DEB; done

If you only use apt-get to obtain your .deb files (i.e. the binary distro) and want to delete the old deb files via Fink:

% sudo apt-get autoclean

Also, with fink package manager version 0.9.13 coming out soon, we will have a 'fink cleanup' command to do the cleaning job.


Have a good cleaning.


Cheers...