Fedora14 is filling up my HDD without a reason

[Richard Shaw]

On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 8:59 AM, Joel Rees <joel.rees at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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.

Slightly OT but tangential point...

If you just want to make sure your metadata isn't stale, try:

yum clean expire-cache

I'm not a yum expert so if someone has a better explanation please
pipe up, but here's my attempt:

This removes some very small (few KB) files which I'm guessing contain
info about the repository including the last time the metadata was
downloaded. This will of course cause that data to be refreshed but
like I said, it's only a few KB, and it will only download new
metadata if it's changed.

I use this frequently because I maintain a few packages for Fedora and
RPMFusion and I like to test them locally, but even when I update my
local repo (copy the packages, run createrepo --update) yum will not
immediately pick up the new packages so I found that running "yum
clean expire-cache" worked in this situation without having to
re-download ALL the metadata.

Richard