cleanup

**fyrephlie** · 10-31-2005

i am wondering if there is a useful tool (note useful... not just existing) for hard disk cleanup... it seems that i have a ludicrous amount of unneeded files... (from everything i have been doing and not paying much attention too...)

thanks

**fyrephlie** · 10-31-2005

oh please answer my question!!

**heartsmagic** · 10-31-2005

For my personal opinion, there is not so effecient tool as you mentioned. Find every unnecessary file in your disk and clean them, huh.

**fyrephlie** · 11-01-2005

ahh linux ... why use a program when you can do it yourself

god help me if i delete the wrong thing!!!

**josolanes** · 11-01-2005

well, what do you want to delete? temp files, browser cache,....?

you can probably write a program for your specific machine that deletes everything. afaik, you'll just place all your commands to delete these files (as if it was in a terminal) into a text document and make it executable. that would make it a script that you can run and it should, if written correctly, do what you want

the reason i said "your specific machine" is because, if a program like this was written, it would have to be tailored to a certain distro...since not all distros have the files in the same locations

**fyrephlie** · 11-01-2005

i could do that ... but i would prolly screw it up pretty bad!!! lol

anyone know what this is?

Code:

fyrephlie@linux&#58;/955904818a1166150c1948018a28> dir
total 4
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 788 2005-10-24 19&#58;38 $shtdwn$.req
fyrephlie@linux&#58;/955904818a1166150c1948018a28>

it appeared in / about a week ago (24 Oct according to this

) and i am not sure what it is ...

the flie is binary

**bidi** · 11-01-2005

1. Make a copy of it;
2. Delete it;
3. If nothing happens, you're good.

Easy!

**josolanes** · 11-01-2005

well, i found out how to delete everything within a directory: "rm -r /path/to/files/*"

anything within the folder "files" in this case will be deleted. i have a question now....is it safe to delete everything within the tmp folder?

this sounds like an interesting idea and i'm writing a program up right now....i plan on only deleting things out of the tmp folder and the browser cache. would it be safe to do?

EDIT: i deleted everything within my tmp folder using that command and restarted without any ill effects. only big change is that i saved 2.6GB by doing so

**heartsmagic** · 11-01-2005

Its name is tmp

**josolanes** · 11-01-2005

Originally Posted by heartsmagic

Its name is tmp

oh well...that makes it simple

for anyone who's interested, this is the program that i wrote up (to delete tmp files):

Code:

rm -r /tmp/*
rm -r /usr/tmp/*

this will work in Gentoo, but i'm not sure where the tmp folders are in other distros (might still be in the same area??)

to make this an executable script:
su into root

Code:

su
&#40;enter root password&#41;

use your favorite text editor...i use nano (i also placed this in /sbin/ so that i can just run it without typing the path...and i named it "cleanup"):

Code:

nano -w /sbin/cleanup

copy the code above into the text editor and save:

Code:

rm -r /tmp/*
rm -r /usr/tmp/*

to save in nano....CTRL+X, then Y, and ENTER

to make it executable:

Code:

chmod a=r+w+x /sbin/cleanup

now you should be able to delete your temporary files by simply typing "cleanup" in a command line as root. this also assumes that you used the correct directories (as written, i know it'll work with Gentoo). you can place the script anywhere you want (such as your /home/user directory) instead if you feel more comfortable with that. if it was in this directory you would type "/home/user/cleanup" to run it.

hope this helps

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