arch-linux – How to Delete Old Packages Installed by Pacman in Arch Linux

arch linuxpackage-managementpacman

I have recently installed Arch Linux and found that I am eating away at a lot of storage relatively quickly. For whatever reason I have already used 17GB in just about 2 weeks. I do not have a great deal of software installed so I am led to believe that all of the old packages are maintained somewhere.

To support this, I have noticed that if I installed a package, remove that package, and then re-install it that pacman merely unpacks and re-installs the software without having to re-download it.

After I installed my base system, before extra software, I used about 2GB or so maybe. I have since only installed Matlab, Skype, Wine, and a few other small programs. Of course I have also installed missing libraries and the like, but not nearly 15GB worth.

Am I completely wrong here or does Arch never delete old packages when downloading/upgrading to new versions?

If so, how do I delete these un-used packages?

Also, when I remove installed packages I use pacman -R ...

Best Answer

No, pacman doesn't remove old packages from your cache (/var/cache/pacman/pkg) so, over time, it can fill up.

You can adopt two approaches to clearing the cache: the brute force one with pacman -Sc:

-c, --clean
Remove packages that are no longer installed from the cache as well as currently unused sync databases to free up disk space. When pacman downloads packages, it saves them in a cache directory. In addition, databases are saved for every sync DB you download from, and are not deleted even if they are removed from the configuration file pacman.conf(5). Use one --clean switch to only remove packages that are no longer installed; use two to remove all files from the cache. In both cases, you will have a yes or no option to remove packages and/or unused downloaded databases.

Or, for a more nuanced approach, you can use one of the utilities that ships with pacman-contrib, paccache:

paccache is a flexible pacman cache cleaning utility, which has numerous options to help control how much, and what, is deleted from any directory containing pacman package tarballs.

By default, paccache -r will remove all but the last three versions of an installed package, but you can change this number with the -k, --keep switch. There is also a -d, --dryrun switch to preview your changes. You can also use the -m, --move <dir> option to move the packages to a separate directory of your choice. See paccache -h or paccache --help for all the switches.

There are a number of utilities in the pacman-contrib package to assist with package management, it is worth looking though them all and gaining an understanding of how they work and can make running Arch much easier. You can see the full list with:

pacman -Ql pacman-contrib | awk -F"[/ ]" '/\/usr\/bin/ {print $NF}'

Related Solutions

Linux – Package management strategy with Pacman

The most likely reason you are seeing packages with pacman -Qe that you don't remember installing is that they were part of a "group" (like base-devel, etc) that you installed.

Side Note: I have personally also been looking for a while to switch a package from "explicit" to "implicit" (and even vice-versa) without reinstalling it, it even taking a package I installed explicitly to get another package working and turn it into a dependency of that package (again without reinstalling).

Linux – See end-nodes of dependency graphs

From the Arch Wiki:

To list all packages no longer required as dependencies (orphans):
$ pacman -Qdt

Or, to recursively remove orphans:

orphans() {
  if [[ ! -n $(pacman -Qdt) ]]; then
    echo "No orphans to remove."
  else
    sudo pacman -Rs $(pacman -Qdtq)
  fi
}

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Linux – Package management strategy with Pacman

Linux – See end-nodes of dependency graphs

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