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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
this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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So OP's headline should be saying instead:
Reminder to CHECK your ~/.cache folder every now and thenCheck? Why?
I don't remember if I ever cleaned it up. Probably a couple years ago when I moved my old HDD to new PC with freshly installed OS. It does not grow accidentally. Only in some very rare cases. As well as some other dirs under
~andvar. If it is a critical system, set up monitoring of free filesystem space. If not, you will notice if it becomes full (I can't remember when this happened to me last time, maybe ~15 years ago when some log file started to grow because of endless error messages).Because some users experienced accidential grows like OP had 160 Gbyte. So general advice for linux users can be stated as: Check your ~/.cache every now and then
Critical systems/servers shall better be monitored as you suggest.
Some users experienced accidential growth of /var/log. Some users experienced accidential growth of /var/cache. Some users experienced accidential growth of /var/lib. Some users experienced accidential growth of ~/.xsession-errors. Shall I continue?
Does every user need to begin his day checking all that places? No, he does not. It is waste of time. Such situations are extremely rare. If you are paranoid, check
dfto see if you have enough free space, and only if it unpredictably shrinked begin to ivestigate which directory has grown.I don't get your point. Why should somebody do this every day?
As the experience from other users in this thread, it seems not extremely rare to have an overgrown ~/.cache/ folder. So checking it from time to time is a good advice. If we all do this for a time, and create bug tickets for software which is not cleaning up. Then this problem will hopefully go away with future software releases.