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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Reminder to clear your ~/.cache folder every now and then (lemmy.world)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by Zangoose to c/[email protected]

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A screenshot of a file manager preview window for my ~/.cache folder, which takes up 164.3 GiB and has 246,049 files and 15,126 folders. The folder was first created about 1.75 years ago with my system

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[–] neonred 38 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (4 children)

Because of excessive RAM I symlink ~/.cache to /tmp. Additionally installing zramswap helps for this scenario.

Benefits are faster access, automatc purging between reboots and no wear to the NMVe drive.

Yes, this is a single user scenario.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago

Isn't most of what's in there just filters downloaded from the internet? Python packages, browser cache, etc? Your system confirms you to redownloading everything all the time, no?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

This seems like a filename conflict waiting to happen. Why not just mount a tmpfs there?

[–] neonred 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Like I said it's a cheap solution for a single user system. Ofc tmpfs would be better but has to be done for every user again

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

You: It's a single user system
Also you: Tmpfs would have to be done for every user

And a /tmp/ symlink would have to be created for every user too, so I don't get your point

Tmpfs is just as easy as making a symlink, but without the filename conflicts between files in ~/.config/ and /tmp/. You just need to add a line to /etc/fstab

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

/usr/local/sbin/adduser.local

One line in there and you can make it add a new line with appropriate /home/userX/.cache tmpfs line to fstab.

Or, maybe a cleaner way, you might make a init/systemd service that, when booting, would run something like

for each dir in /home do
mount dir/.tmp -type tmpfs
done

I'm not at the computer now and I'm lazy to Google it, so this above is just a pseudo code and probably won't run.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Neat, thanks for sharing

Here's the above pseudocode in bash:

find /home/ -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d -exec mount none {}/.cache/ -t tmpfs -o size=16G \;

for doesn't work here because it uses spaces to delimit strings, which could cause issues with filenames that contain spaces

You can also create a systemd user service, which is useful if you don't have root access. The above mount command requires root, but the following doesn't and is more robust than symlinking to /tmp/:

ln -s $(mktemp -dp /var/tmp/) ~/.config/

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

Once I get more than 16GB of ram I'll definitely try that

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Thats not very secure. /tmp/ is usually 777