On Sun, Jan 12, 2003, Shoshannah Forbes wrote about "Dealing with low disk space":
> Is there any utility out there that can help me figure out what is
> using all my HD space and what can be removed safely, without making a
> mess?
Several people suggested "du" to you.
Du would be very useful when used on your own home directory, to find
files which you created and that you consider are safe to delete.
But it's not very useful outside your own directory; When du tells you
that "/usr" takes 2 GB, how do you know what in there you can safely delete?
Also, when running on an RPM-based system (such as Redhat) you are not
supposed (usually) to remove individual programs - you are supposed to
remove a package, which removes the program along with whichever other
files were installed with it.
Another benefit of using "rpm -e packagename" to remove a whole package
instead of trying to remove individual files yourself, is that "rpm -e"
won't let you remove something that something else depends on.
For example, it won't let you remove some shared library you think is not
important, if another program is using that library and you didn't remove
that other program first.
What you'll probably want to do is to list all the packages on your system
in size-order (so that you can focus on checking and maybe deleting the
largest ones). Do this by running
rpm -q --queryformat "%{NAME} %{SIZE}\n" -a | sort +1nr | less
Now, look at the largest RPMs. If you can't what a certain RPM is, run
rpm -qil packagename | less
to show you the package's description ('i') and the files it includes ('l').
When a package seems useless to you, say a package of Swedish translations
of KDE messages, feel free to "rpm -e" it (you'll need to run "rpm -e" as
root, obviously).
Rpm -e will, again, refuse to remove packages that something else depends
on, so you have nothing to fear.
Just try not to remove packages that you use yourself ;)
Another tip: on Redhat, many libraries come in two seperate packages,
a normal package and a -devel packages (for example "gnome-libs" and
"gnome-libs-devel"). If you are never planning to compile anything on your
machine, you can remove most of these -devel packages. I would leave
glibc-devel behind, though - because without it you'll not be able to
compile any C program, at all (hmm, some people might not even care about
that).
--
Nadav Har'El | Sunday, Jan 12 2003, 9 Shevat 5763
[EMAIL PROTECTED] |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |The meek shall inherit the Earth, for
http://nadav.harel.org.il |they are too timid to refuse it.
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