Missing Something.....

[Tim]

On Sat, 2012-07-14 at 23:12 -0400, Eddie G.O'Connor Jr-I wrote:
> but what would delete all the unnecessary files that are 
> amassed over time? Surely they're not all listed in the "tmp" 
> folder!.....

It depends on what you mean by "unnecessary files."

Temporary files created by programs are created in tmp directories, and
are supposedly culled by the system some time later, automatically.
There are tmpwatch scripts that handle that.  And if the tmp directory
is a tmpfs (temporary file system) mounted on that point, the contents
will be lost after shutdown, and during reboot.

Web browser cache files are kept within the browsers directories in your
homespace.  The browser automatically manages them according to your
browser preferences (e.g. if you tell it to use 400 megs of space, it
maintains that cache at that level).

Packages downloaded by YUM for installing or upgrading are cached
within /var/cache/yum (or somewhere similar, if the location has changed
since I last manually dealt with it).  And YUM can be set to keep the
cache, or prune it when finished installing.  I believe the current
defaults are to remove the cached files as it finished.

If you manually download files, such as with your web browser, it's up
to you to delete them when finished with.  You could semi-automate this
by always downloading them to the /tmp directory, so the system will
remove them a couple of days after you've finished with them.

(Back in my Amiga days, I used to download to, and unpack archives, in
the trashcan directory.  It was a normal directory, so that you could
use it like that, just with a convenient empty trash function triggered
from the desktop icon.)

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

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