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

Zangoose@lemmy.world to Linux@lemmy.ml – 425 points –

::: spoiler Alt Text A screenshot of a file manager preview window for my ~/.cache folder, which takes up 164.3 GiB and has 246,049 files and 15,126 folders. The folder was first created about 1.75 years ago with my system :::

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Because of excessive RAM I symlink ~/.cache to /tmp. Additionally installing zramswap helps for this scenario.

Benefits are faster access, automatc purging between reboots and no wear to the NMVe drive.

Yes, this is a single user scenario.

Isn't most of what's in there just filters downloaded from the internet? Python packages, browser cache, etc? Your system confirms you to redownloading everything all the time, no?

This seems like a filename conflict waiting to happen. Why not just mount a tmpfs there?

Like I said it's a cheap solution for a single user system. Ofc tmpfs would be better but has to be done for every user again

You: It's a single user system
Also you: Tmpfs would have to be done for every user

And a /tmp/ symlink would have to be created for every user too, so I don't get your point

Tmpfs is just as easy as making a symlink, but without the filename conflicts between files in ~/.config/ and /tmp/. You just need to add a line to /etc/fstab

/usr/local/sbin/adduser.local

One line in there and you can make it add a new line with appropriate /home/userX/.cache tmpfs line to fstab.

Or, maybe a cleaner way, you might make a init/systemd service that, when booting, would run something like

for each dir in /home do
mount dir/.tmp -type tmpfs
done

I'm not at the computer now and I'm lazy to Google it, so this above is just a pseudo code and probably won't run.

Neat, thanks for sharing

Here's the above pseudocode in bash:

find /home/ -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d -exec mount none {}/.cache/ -t tmpfs -o size=16G \;

for doesn't work here because it uses spaces to delimit strings, which could cause issues with filenames that contain spaces

You can also create a systemd user service, which is useful if you don't have root access. The above mount command requires root, but the following doesn't and is more robust than symlinking to /tmp/:

ln -s $(mktemp -dp /var/tmp/) ~/.config/