Linux Mint Forums

Can someone give me the command one would use to watch a log or logs while bleachbit does a cleaning? I would use the gui to clean but I want to view the action on the log as it is taking place.

The best advice:
Don't use this.
Remove it immediately.

Linux doesn't need those tools. But those tools can damage your system.

I appreciate your advice and concern cosmo. I have been using bleachbit on Linux for forever and a day...no problems. I would like to know where to find the log file I can watch when it does a clean form the gui. I have been using Linux for several years. Not a total newbie but no expert.

Is this what you are looking for?
http://www.howtogeek.com/116971/7-tips- ... for-linux/

I agree with cosmo (and many others).

Mintster wrote:I want to view the action on the log as it is taking place.

Entries in a log file happen after something takes place. By the time you see it, the action has been done. There is no recovery of deleted files at that point.

I have not found any documentation that bleach bit even creates a log file (and I'm not about to install it on any of my systems to find out). I believe the best you can do is run the individual 'cleaners' from the command line and redirect output to a file.

at least I found a command that works for me.
bleachbit --overwrite --clean --preset
I tried to make it run at boot but no success so far.
Still learning. I love Mint Cinnamon!

I have to agree with minster. I have used Bleachbit for well over a year now without problems. I operate it as root and just select those items needed to be deleted using the gui. Especially rotated logs. I know I could also set up a rotating system but this is easier. It's like everything else be patient, be careful and don't drink coffee whilst typing on the keyboard.

dutchenery wrote:Especially rotated logs.

This is a one-time action to limit the size of the log files, so you'll never need BB for that again:
https://sites.google.com/site/easylinux ... -log-files
(item 6, left column)

I do have a question that is related to this topic, but I don't want to open up yet another BleachBit thread:

I am genuinely curious as to how much space anyone has ever saved by using a tool like BleachBit. I have Linux computers that have been running for well over two decades, and I have never done any of this cleaning, nor have I needed to. Same with my modern machines, with all the extra GUI enhancements. I let the built-in log rotation scripts and other housekeeping scripts do their job.

Please, I don't want to ignite another debate about the merits of BleachBit. I only want to know if someone has ever saved a significant amount of space (more than just a a few tens of megabytes), or derived some *noticable* performance benefit from using this tool. No more, no less. Thanks.

LinuxJim wrote:I am genuinely curious as to how much space anyone has ever saved by using a tool like BleachBit.

I know that some Ubuntu users use BleachBit as an "easy" way of getting rid of old kernels, which can reclaim a considerable amount of disk space. Because Ubuntu has the habit of flooding you with very frequent kernel updates.

This is however a moot point for Linux Mint users, who don't get kernel updates by default and who have such an easy kernel tool in Update Manager....

Pjotr wrote: I know that some Ubuntu users use BleachBit as an "easy" way of getting rid of old kernels, which can reclaim a considerable amount of disk space. Because Ubuntu has the habit of flooding you with very frequent kernel updates.

This is however a moot point for Linux Mint users, who don't get kernel updates by default and who have such an easy kernel tool in Update Manager....

That's a good point, Pjotr. Most of the distributions I've used automatically delete older kernels, keeping only the most recent two or three. I wasn't aware that Ubuntu did not.

LinuxJim wrote:

Pjotr wrote: I know that some Ubuntu users use BleachBit as an "easy" way of getting rid of old kernels, which can reclaim a considerable amount of disk space. Because Ubuntu has the habit of flooding you with very frequent kernel updates.

This is however a moot point for Linux Mint users, who don't get kernel updates by default and who have such an easy kernel tool in Update Manager....

That's a good point, Pjotr. Most of the distributions I've used automatically delete older kernels, keeping only the most recent two or three. I wasn't aware that Ubuntu did not.

Indeed Ubuntu doesn't. It can get pretty annoying, especially if you've been running an LTS version for more than a year or so. You can have amassed literally dozens of kernels then.

In my Ubuntu days, I used Synaptic for removing the three packages that came with each kernel I wished to remove. It was rather cumbersome (although I still preferred using Synaptic over using BleachBit).

But Linux Mint has no need for all that, thankfully.

LinuxJim wrote:I am genuinely curious as to how much space anyone has ever saved by using a tool like BleachBit.

Concentrating on BB (or whatever) not used with elevated rights, so only regarding home: Obviously not more, than there is stored. As it is assumable, that all content in not hidden folders are stored by will and shall not get deleted (at least not by any automated tool), we can ignore them.

What you have in the hidden folders (mainly interesting from the aspect of size, not of importance):
Trash - can be very big but can be deleted with board tools or - if you want - with the help of the package trash-cli. (There is a dconf-setting in Cinnamon for automatically deleting older Trash content, but this never worked.)
.cache - can easily be deleted, if the user thinks, that he does not want it.
.wine - 1.4 GB in my case: Nothing what I want to get deleted, otherwise I would not had it installed. By far the biggest part are 2 of my astronomy programs (nearly 1 GB).
.config - 600 MB in my case: Biggest parts are the profiles for LibreOffice and Qupzilla which I would not want to get deleted, the rest are 4 MB (but also important to get my system and my programs running as I want.
.thunderbird - If somebody wants to autodelete his mails, he can use a setting in the program, for me no option.
.mozilla - in my case 200 MB, mostly exensions, which I installed by will. If someone finds it useful to delete his history, he can set so - or tell the browser to always use the private mode, This will hardly free more than 1 MB.
.cinnamon - 7 MB here, nearly completely occupied by configuration files, nothing to delete except perhaps(!) glass.log, this gives 15 kb.
All the other default hidden folders have less than 3 MB together. That does not mean, that there can be 3 MB deleted without consequences, but obviously not more.

Leaving Trash and .cache out of the view, as they can easily be deleted without the need of any knowledge or tool I come to a sum which does hardly extend 1 MB - if at all. If I simulate the installation of bleachbit, synaptic tells me, that this will occupy 3.7 MB. If I would install and use it, it would - although insignificantly - loose space.

Assuming that most systems at least 50 GB of disk space - most have far far more - you can hardly express the "saved" space in a percent value, it would need several zeros to the right of the decimal point.

Thanks Cosmo. I understand your points and agree, but I am looking for someone who actually uses BleachBit to tell us what (if any) benefit they have derived beyond saving a few megabytes of space. I don't want to turn this into a theoretical or philosophical discussion. Thanks.

Now to the practical result (took of course some time to execute it):

I did a test in a virtual machine (all is restorable there via a VM-snapshot). Bleachbit made 10 MB free. Investigating how this was done I found, that it completely removed one of my FF-profiles, without any warning and without any hint in the BB-GUI.

Result: BB saved nothing (the FF-profile was not supposed to get removed, otherwise I would have done this myself and could have done this with the FF-profile-manager). But BB deleted user-data!

Theoretical considerations and a bunch of experiences have been proven.

I have witnessed savings from 4 kb upto 8 gb, depending on what I what applications I have ran, how long since I cleaned up and selections I chose.

My HTPC is a small machine with 32gig SD card that hosts the linux mint os and its other stuff plus KODI.
This is 95% watching movies and 5% other
Now with such a small piece of real estate (32 gig with about 20 gig free after cleaning) I like to keep an eye on this before I run out of space, or nephews figure out how to close KODI and load up FireFox or Opera or whatever. They (or anyone for that fact) doesnt need to know I look at my bank acct on this machine or go to forums or watch porno on this. My house, my rules but I get random visitors. I cant say "Wait - let me clean up my computer really quick even though you might not use it"
I keep this machine nice and clean

Another machine which has much more ram and better processor does much more:
Torrents, Pidgin, games, browsers, virtual machines, gimp, etc
Today I could save 305 meg as normal user, and 132 meg as admin
*I cleaned this not to long ago - I think 5 days ago???

Another machine (my server so to speak)
Runs MySQL, Wine (MailWasher), proxy server, DNS server, torrents, virtual machines, etc
*this is a set and forget environment
Today could save 137 meg as a normal user and 7.36 Gig as admin
*I think I cleaned this sometime Nov/Dev 2015


Since my "server" has 500+ gig free on /home, me cleaning up would save 1.4% space - tiny
On my htpc, if I cleaned up 7.3 gig of space, that would reclaim 35% space - huge

Now a savvy linux user could find all of the 7.3 gig of files in question without BB
Everyone will have their own opinion of what is "safe to delete" and "what isn't safe" as well, so my 7.3 gig could be "5 gig of bad choices" in other peoples eyes.

Anyone can click on their browser options and "remove history", too. Or they can locate the file on the os that hold history and remove this way, or make a script to do it too. Same with other log files.


If you dont think cleaning up linux is a good idea and it can handle itself and you never had a problem, great.
If you dont like BB because for historical reason you personally been involved with, we all can understand that.
If you use BB although you could research and make script(s) to accomplish the same end result, and BB never caused harm, great.

atari800 wrote:My HTPC is a small machine with 32gig SD card that hosts the linux mint os and its other stuff plus KODI.

Not a good idea. Only the flash memory of an SSD is fit for the frequent write actions of an operating system. The flash memory of an SD card is not: expect rapid deterioration.

They (or anyone for that fact) doesnt need to know I look at my bank acct on this machine or go to forums or watch porno on this. My house, my rules but I get random visitors.

For those visitors, you can create a dedicated account or even a guest account:
https://sites.google.com/site/easylinux ... -Mint-17.3
(item 1, left column)

Pjotr wrote:Not a good idea. Only the flash memory of an SSD is fit for the frequent write actions of an operating system. The flash memory of an SD card is not: expect rapid deterioration.

The system is this Liva Bat Mini (2gb /32 g)
Amazon shows ssd, mint shows it as SD Card
Either way - if it lasts 2 years, I am happy. I got mine for <$85 at the time

But it functions just fine as a media player

Also, I have all heavily written directories writing to ram drives
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777,size=20% 0 0
tmpfs /var/tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,nodev,nosuid,noexec,mode=1777 0 0
tmpfs /var/spool tmpfs defaults,noatime,nodev,nosuid,noexec,mode=1777 0 0
tmpfs /var/log tmpfs defaults,noatime,nodev,nosuid,noexec,mode=0755 0 0
tmpfs /var/lock tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=0755 0 0
tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults,size=20%

* I know it make it impossible for triaging system errors but that ok for this machine, but I am confident I can fix those that may occur
I also have sysctrl.conf set to do more caching in memory.

--edit for visitors--
Thats great and I got this on the bigger machine but the HTPC just boots and auto starts KODI as user KODI and the little time I am using it to surf web outside of movies, I dont exit to another account. If this was a high traffic machine, I would do things different. Again, random visitors, random times, random uses for the machine in the livingroom. Technically I should have it clean up on each reboot.
But that is a project for a rainy weekend.
Thanks for the idea - it is a great one

--edit fixed a typo--

If you want to use this software-wrecking ball, you do it with your alone and fully responsibility.

Mint as a build in tool to format a stick, which erases the complete content. There is no need for any other software. Look into the accessories menu.

Didilo wrote:Can Bleachbit securely erase a usb stick ?

Yes, it can. And a shotgun can kill a mosquito.
Just keep in mind that there is a risk of collateral damage, and it's not like you NEED this much firepower to do the task at hand. But I'm sure it's a possible way of doing it.