Detoxing your operating system
Cleanup Crew
© Lead Image © bisgleich, photocase.com
Linux and many Internet services just love logging. To keep your system from putting on too much weight and wasting valuable disk space, we present an effective diet with guaranteed success.
Well-used computers rapidly acquire many files in the depths of the system that you no longer need; additionally, the system accumulates duplicate and multiply stored data. Manually searching for duplicates, temporary files, or orphaned files can be extremely difficult in view of the several hundred thousand files that most popular Linux distributions keep in their storage systems. Armed with a couple of helpers, however, you can quickly deal with any unnecessary clutter and keep your system permanently clean.
Analysis
The starting point of any cleaning action is careful analysis of the data sets. A tool that is particularly suitable for this is a small Java program named JDiskReport that elicits all the necessary information from your hard disk. The program is available as a ZIP archive [1]; just unpack and move the newly created JDiskReport-1.4.1 directory to a suitable place (e.g., /opt). You can then start the software by calling
java -jar /opt/jdiskreport-1.4.1.jar
[...]
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