Reminder to clear your ~/.cache folder every now and then

redd, 1 year ago

Is it safe to clear ~/.cache/mozilla/ while Firefox is running?

Pantherina, 1 year ago

No.

Zangoose, 1 year ago

Maybe not while it’s running, but .cache is intended to be temporary files only so expecting files to permanently be there should be treated as a bug

Pantherina, 1 year ago

Your Distro should normally do that for you.

Advising for this means people will delete random cache and download stuff always.

Are multiple files in there? If yes you could add a script that only deletes files of certain age.

Takios, 1 year ago

I’m not aware of any distro that automatically clears a user’s .cache in their home directories. Maybe you’re thinking of /var/cache?

HiddenLayer5, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

I just map both the user cache and the /tmp directory to a RAM drive. I allocated 4 GB but in practice it never gets even close to that much, and Linux seems to not be reserving the entire 4 GB at boot so I would assume how much RAM is used depends on how much is actually in your cache.

It also defers cache and tempfile related problems to turning it off and on again.

vox, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

seems like a bug in one of rhe programs you’re using.
modt software automatically manages it’s cache…
are you using build caching tools such as Mozilla sccache? These tend to create 20gb+ cache directories, especially if used with debug builds

lntl, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

$ crontab -e

• • • */2 * rm -rf /home/lntl/.cache

noroute, 1 year ago

You can also setup a cron job to periodically clean oldest files for you.

Example: @weekly find ~/.cache -type f -mtime +7 -delete

This will delete everything older than 7 days inside your cache folder.

twei, 1 year ago

I guess you could also Mount a tmpfs to that directory

therealjcdenton, 1 year ago

NEVER

https://lemmy.zip/pictrs/image/d48cb113-84c0-44e1-ae7d-7bb23f172fcf.webp

sunred, 1 year ago

du -sh ~/.cache/* | sort -h