Fedora14 is filling up my HDD without a reason

[Joel Rees]

(Not to be a spelling nazi, but, ...)

On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 8:52 AM, Patrick O'Callaghan
<pocallaghan at gmail.com> wrote:
> [...]
> Since you (wisely) use yum for package installation/removal, you
> shouldn't touch /var or /user directly but check which package owns it

/usr

> and consider removing the package, e.g.
>
[Aradnix:
> $ rpm -qf /var/huge-file

So,

cd /var
sudo du -hs * | more

# and you see that /var/lib , /var/spool , /var/tmp , and /var/log
# (among others?) have a lot of stuff in them.

sudo du hs lib/* spool/* | more

# texmf may show up as a big package

rpm -qf /var/lib/texmf
rpm -qf /var/lib/texmf
yum info texlive-texmf
yum info texlive

# And maybe you decide you don't need texlive

> bigpackage-2.4.3-fc14.x86_64
> $ sudo yum erase bigpackage

sudo rpm erase texlive

# and so forth, for various packages tha you decide you don't need.
# yum will tell you the dependencies, so you're not flying entirely blind.

# rpm -q also works in the /usr subdirectories

# You may want to take note of the size of the mail and abrt spools.
# Both the abrt notifier and the mail agent should allow you to delete old
# messaegs you no longer need.]

>> Genes told me that I need to scrub my cache, that's right, but how?
>
> You already did that using "yum clean all". Note that "yum clean
> packages" would probably have freed almost as much space without
> removing yum metadata, which is why I suggested it earlier.

Good point.

I personally like to avoid stale metadata, so I tend not to think
beyond the "all" option, but the metadata will be necessary as soon as
Aradnix needs to do even a yum info, so it's space that's not really
freed even if it's freed.