How Debian uses apt-get for cleanup

This article introduces the knowledge of "how Debian uses apt-get to clean up". In the operation of actual cases, many people will encounter such a dilemma, so let the editor lead you to learn how to deal with these situations. I hope you can read it carefully and be able to achieve something!

It is common to run apt-get commands on Debian-based systems. Software packages are updated quite frequently, and commands such as apt-get update and apt-get upgrade make this process very easy. On the other hand, how often do you use apt-get clean, apt-get autoclean or apt-get autoremove?

These commands clean up and delete files that are still on the system but are no longer needed after the apt-get installation, usually because the program that needs them has been uninstalled.

Apt-get clean

The apt-get clean command clears the local repository of retrieved package files left in / var/cache. The directories it clears are / var/cache/apt/archives/ and / var/cache/apt/archives/partial/. The only files it leaves in / var/cache/apt/archives are the lock file and the partial subdirectory.

Before running the cleanup operation, the directory may contain many files:

/ var/cache/apt/archives/db5.3-util_5.3.28+dfsg1-0.6ubuntu1_amd64.deb/var/cache/apt/archives/db-util_1%3a5.3.21~exp1ubuntu2_all.deb/var/cache/apt/archives/lock/var/cache/apt/archives/postfix_3.4.5-1ubuntu1_amd64.deb/var/cache/apt/archives/sasl2-bin_2.1.27+dfsg-1build3_amd64.deb

After that, only these will exist:

$sudo ls-lR / var/cache/apt/archives/var/cache/apt/archives:total 4When RWMI r-1 root root 0 Jan 5 2018 lockdrwx- 2 _ apt root 4096 Nov 12 07:24 partial / var/cache/apt/archives/partial:total 0