[Solved] cleanup of temporary files - a newbie questuon

[ineuw]

I am using BleachBit to clean up the browser cache and the system's temporary files, which can total up to 400MB at a time. What happens to the system if these files are never cleaned up by the user? Is there an automatic that removes the accumulated junk? Or the temp files use the same name and are overwritten?

[Cosmo.]

Temporary files, which are stored in /tmp, get automatically deleted by the system with every reboot. The browser cache is usually limited by the browser itself, this can get configured in the browser, also the cache can get deleted. There is no need for a software wrecking ball for that purpose. Even not, if the result is an amount, which makes most likely not even a tenths of one percent of the size of your drive. (In other words: 400 MB is today flyspeck.)

[Flemur]

I am using BleachBit to clean up the browser cache and the system's temporary files, which can total up to 400MB at a time.

Free advice: stay away from the BlechBit "wipe" feature.

What happens to the system if these files are never cleaned up by the user? Is there an automatic that removes the accumulated junk? Or the temp files use the same name and are overwritten?

Linux OS cleans its own files pretty well, but others would depend on the program that wrote the files, e.g. the browser.

[aes2011]

I am using BleachBit to clean up the browser cache and the system's temporary files, which can total up to 400MB at a time. What happens to the system if these files are never cleaned up by the user? Is there an automatic that removes the accumulated junk? Or the temp files use the same name and are overwritten?

Hi,
Side question: are you the tooltip background guy?

Back on topic:
As Cosmo said, strictly temporary files automatically created by programs are in /tmp and that's taken care of automatically on shutdown.

There are cache files such as in /var/cache/apt/archives for which sudo apt-get autoclean (mild) or sudo apt-get clean (strong) could be used.

There are files in ~/.cache. I prefer to use the application itself to clear the corresponding cache in the case of google-chrome or firefox. ncdu is a nice terminal application to see what ~/.cache contains.

Your home folder may also have a .thumbnails folder. Once in a while, I delete it.

If you don't want Firefox to create thumbnails, Make a new about:config entry of type boolean called browser.pagethumbnails.capturing_disabled. Set it to true.

As for locales, see https://askubuntu.com/questions/477974/ ... ry-locales and the heated comments for one of the answers.

And if you're very sure you don't need 32-bit software, you could look at https://askubuntu.com/questions/113301/ ... untu-64bit

That's all I can think of for now!

[ineuw]

Thanks for the advice. I will remove it.