What do I do with .deb files on /var/cache/apt/archives?

[fernando_a_martin]

I have mint 14 on a pc and on a netbook. Everytime I install or update something on my pc, all the downloaded packages (.deb files) remain at on /var/cache/apt/archives.
It's very useful for me. I never chose some option to do it, it came doing so out of the box. But I like it because it saves me a lot of time. I don't need to download everything again in my netbook. I just copy packages that remained at/var/cache/apt/archives to the netbook and install them using dpkg. Great!
But after that I don't need that large amount of deb files that remain on /var/cache/apt/archives and I don't know what I do with them.
Once, out of curiosity, I used dolphin as root, and removed all the deb files that were in var/cache/apt/archives and the next time I booted kde was broken and I could not log into kde anymore. I don't know if it was coincidence or not. But I never tried to clean var/cache/apt/archives manually again.
So now I ask: What do I do with .deb files that remain on /var/cache/apt/archives after installations and updtes?

[tdockery97]

I believe it was coincidence. Once installed, those .deb files no longer play an active role in your system.

[eanfrid]

If you want to do some manual cleaning in this directory, you only have to:

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get autoclean

to remove old packages no more available in repos from cache or

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get clean

to remove from cache all downloaded packages

[fernando_a_martin]

Thaks. Very useful suggestions.