CentOS - Dec 2021 - how to clear out /var/cache?

Skylar: that's more or less what I've been doing, looking for huge
things
in /.

Kenneth: the latest version of kdirstat appears to now be named qdirstat,
no kde bits required. it is certainly a handy way to quickly find the disk
space sinks. Thanks for the pointer.

but I still don't know the proper way to clear out a lot of this stuff. I
certainly don't want to hose my system.

It is C7, up to date, and it has been running for at least five years with
partitions as they are set now: / is 50 gigs. had a popup message this
morning telling me that / was nearly full. found it with 2 gigs free.
sounds as if something has been slowly eating away at the space. I could
use gparted to rearrange things, making / bigger, but as it has been going
for five years, it strikes me that it more likely needs a lot of garbage
collection to be done. I've manually cleaned up some detritus, it now
reports 3.7G free which should hold me for a little while.

So, can anyone advise me on what is and what is not safe to whack/delete
from the root partition?

Thanks!

Fred

On Thu, Dec 30, 2021 at 7:16 PM Kenneth Porter <shiva at sewingwitch.com>
wrote:
> --On Thursday, December 30, 2021 6:20 PM -0500 Fred <fred.fredex at
gmail.com>
>
> wrote:
>
> > Mine has hit over 3 gigs, making it one of the larger directories in
/,
> > which is running low on space. I've hit all the low-hanging fruit
I can
> > find and now I come to things like /var/cache, and I don't know
what to
> do
> > about such.
>
> Have you run KDirStat to find the disk pigs? I regularly use its Windows
> derivative, WinDirStat.
>
> <http://kdirstat.sourceforge.net/>
> <https://windirstat.net/>
>
> I wish there was a web-based version for headless servers without X
> libraries.
>
> _______________________________________________
> CentOS mailing list
> CentOS at centos.org
> https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
>

On 12/30/2021 6:39 PM, Fred wrote:
> but I still don't know the proper way to clear out a lot of this stuff.
I
> certainly don't want to hose my system.
My next step, on finding a candidate pig, would be to use "rpm -qf" to
identify which package owns the pig, and then look at how to clean that 
package's junk and reduce its growth.

Il Ven 31 Dic 2021, 03:39 Fred <fred.fredex at gmail.com> ha scritto:
[snip]
>
>
> > --On Thursday, December 30, 2021 6:20 PM -0500 Fred <
> fred.fredex at gmail.com>
> >
> > wrote:
> >
> > > Mine has hit over 3 gigs, making it one of the larger directories
in /,
> > > which is running low on space. I've hit all the low-hanging
fruit I can
> > > find and now I come to things like /var/cache, and I don't
know what to
> > do
> > > about such.
> >
>
If you go into /var/cache and run
du -sh *
you should see which subdirectories take more space and so on going through
their subdirectories... to pinpoint the main specific  component
responsible of the space occupation..

With the * in the command above you don't catch elements (files or
directories) beginning with a . but I don't think there are normally this
kind of objects... Just in case you can run a
ll -a
to be sure of that..
Hih,
Gianluca