There's something satisfying about cleaning up your hard drive. Today I rooted through my hard drive and got rid of old files, unneeded downloads, and digital cruft. As the reward for my labor: 850 fresh megabytes, free for the filling.
I like getting rid of stuff. Really, I do. It's liberating. That's why I was quite disturbed when I got in this evening and discovered those 850 MBs were gone! Where did they go? They just disappeared! Fortunately, I had du, ls, and grep on my side.
After lots of typing, I discovered ".xsession-errors" in my home directory. It had grown to a mere 1.2 GB! Woa! Thanks to a bug in nautilus's thumbnail generation involving an infinite loop and "fprintf" statements, I had lots of junk filling up my harddrive. Simply deleting the file didn't cut it because 9 different programs had the file open. After logging out of gnome and logging back in, 1.2 GB magically reappeared. Phew. I had my free space back.
I really need to upgrade my home computer. I have a very old version of gnome and I'd much prefer to have something more current. It's time to put Gentoo on my desktop machine. Now, all I have to do is find the time.
Posted by enigma at March 28, 2004 10:57 PM