Broom and Dust Pan

The Linux environment includes dozens of tools for disk maintenance. We introduce you to a few of the favorites.

- By Erik Bärwaldt and Ferdinand Thommes

Linux workstations usually come with more preinstalled software than you will find on Windows or macOS. A full-featured Linux system might contain more than a hundred thousand files, and that is before the user even starts adding temporary files, logs, and downloads. Without the right choice of tools, it’s easy to lose track when it comes to maintaining a system and keeping it lean.

Linux has multiple tools for almost any task, and disk cleanup is no exception. Some cleanup tools are included with the major Linux distributions, and others are only a download away. This article highlights some useful tools for keeping your system tidy.

Bleaching with BleachBit

BleachBit is a very compact graphical application for removing obsolete data from the system [1]. The tool is not limited to the logs and temporary files created and managed by the operating system; it also detects installed applications and can then remove their history and logfiles. Some of the pre-configured routines can also overwrite the matching data areas on the storage device to make it impossible to reconstruct the deleted data at a later date.

BleachBit is available in the repositories of almost all Linux derivatives and is usually easy to install with a package manager such as Discover or Synaptic. The BleachBit project website offers binary packages of the latest version for the major distributions. During the install, two starter icons are added to the desktop menu. One opens the program with the current user’s rights, and the other icon lets you delete obsolete system files after you authenticate as an admin user.

The first time you start BleachBit, a settings wizard pops up to let you specify the folders you want to select for deletion and where you want BleachBit to overwrite the free space. You can also configure some generic default settings, such as the language selection, and enable automatic updates.