A proposal for a graphical linux disk
cleaner
Proposal: A graphical Linux disk cleaner
This is a proposal for a disk/homedir-cleaning GUI application
for Linux desktops. This utility should be useful when trying to free
some disk space and also useful for running before taking full backups,
so no temporary, cached or backup files are included in the backup.
See also: Ubuntu
System Cleanup Tool
What we currently have
- KleanSweep is
KDE-based and lacks several important "clean targets"
- fslint is a
duplicate finder, has a very complicated interface
- SCleaner is
WXWidgets-based, the interface is also complicated here
Features that we really need
- Full command-line support (call from backup scripts)
- Integration with other utilities (which?)
- Automated mode with known-irrelevant clean targets (i.e.
thumbnails)
What can/should be cleaned?
- Remove thumbnails in ~/.thumbnails
- Remove Firefox/Mozilla/Thunderbird cache content
- Remove files found via a specific pattern (*.bak, *~, etc..)
- "Setup files" (this could search for *.deb files in the user's homedir)
- Reduce size of git repositories (git-repack + git-prune-packed)
- Unused dotfile folders in user's homedir (manual mode?)
- Folders with a makefile that contain a "clean"/"distclean" target
- Files created by Windows and/or Mac OS X (__MACOSX__, Thumbs.db, ...)
- Trash (User's trash can, probably via Freedesktop trash spec)
- Maybe: Duplicate files via dupmerge
The utility on other platforms
This is Windows Vista's Disk
Cleanup utility, which we already know
from previous versions of Windows - looks about the same
from previous versions of Windows - looks about the same
ChangeLog
- 2008-05-12 First document version
Thomas Perl (thp at this domain); jabber: thp@jabber.org