?Discussion

Freeing Disk Space

If you are running near the end of your disk space, the information may help you.

Command line tools to see which package are using the most disk space:

aptitude -F '%I %p' search '~i'|egrep '^[0-9]+[\.,]?[0-9]*[MG]B'|sort -n

Using ?dpigs (debian-goodies):

```
dpigs -n50
```

Using wajig:

```
wajig size
```

Tools to erase

files you do not want

bleachbit (Squeeze and later)
localepurge

packages you do not want

Tools to alter files to reduce them

?strip (binutils)
- eg. strip --strip-unneeded foo
upx-ucl

Reduce data creation

Use the following line as your /etc/rsyslog.conf configuration file in order to not save logs but output them on virtual terminal 12:

```
*.* -/dev/tty12
```

Note that localepurge is a package that will strip unwanted language versions from everything you install. If you want a new language in the future you will have to add the locale and then re-install the package.

You might consider running dpkg -l periodically and manually going through it to see if there are packages which you never use. Aptitude purge <unused package> will warn you if the package is needed by something else.

ToDo - Write a script to show the number of times each package has been used recently (least first) and the date of last use. This would allow you to purge packages you have forgotten about and never/rarely use.