Clean up/Optimize Linux OS from unnecessary files

Question

please guide me to how clean up my linux pc from unnecessary and old files.

After I remove some application such as Zend Server, some of their files are still in my file system.

I try to use bleachbit, but it is not full scanner?

Is there any bash script or other solution to solve this? some thing like CCleaner in windows can be helpful.

happy new year.

Answer 1

Sounds like you are still thinking with a windows mentality. Linux generally won't slow down if there are unused files on your system. They just won't be used.

Answer 2

If the problem is that space is getting tight on your hard drive (which seems to happen on every hard drive I know) here's how I handle it.

I have a little program called dscan. What it does is first a depth-first tree walk of the directory tree, adding up the sizes of all the files. Suppose that is N bytes.

Then it walks it again, pretending to read every file, counting bytes as it goes. Whenever it passes a multiple of N/20, it prints out the path of the file it is pretending to be in the process of reading.

The result is 20 file paths being printed out, evenly distributed over the number of bytes in the tree.

If there is a file, or group of files, or even just a type of file, like precompiled headers, or files belonging to so-and-so, occupying some good percent of the tree, like 30%, 20%, or 70%, no matter how deeply it is buried, or how diffusely, that is roughly the percent of lines that will show it. Then I can clean it out.

If the offending files are on a shared drive and belong to somebody else, they don't always like being asked if those files are really necessary, but that's what has to be done.