DAMTP Computing News

A clightly updated version of our cleanup script has been installed with some minor updates to make it more useful. We also added the (previously missing!) link to allow it to work on MacOSX machines.

It now considers .viminf*.tmp (junk) files for deletion and if run from a terminal (if stdin is a tty) will prompt for confirmation if no directory is specified -- the old behaviour of scanning HOME apparently confused some users.

The brief summary is:

Cleanup does a pass over one or more directories checking for various files which should either be removed or compressed to save disk space.

No file is removed unless it has not been accessed (read) for at least 7 days. The files which are considered for removal are: emacs backups (~, #file#), viminfo temporary backup files (.viminf.tmp), gimp swap files (.gimpswap.*), *.bak files where the base file exists, *.o files, *.dvi *.log, *.aux files where the matching *.tex file exists, core, nohup.out and a.out files unaccessed for 28 days.

It also compresses core, nohup.out and a.out files unaccessed for 7 days and any uncompressed file over 100K which has not been read for over 28 days.

There are options to control some of these values, prompt before doing anything and a ``dummy'' mode where it just gives a summary of what savings could be expected. See the man page for more details.

The old versions of pine (4.63), Mozilla (1.7.10), Firefox (1.0.6), Thunderbird (1.0.6), gnuplot (4.0.0), and pstoedit (3.33 as mentioned in news item 858), will shortly be removed.

Hopefully no-one is still relying on these old versions (we installed newer versions some time ago).

We still have pine 4.58 (only) on some systems (Irix6 and Tru64/OSF1), since we believe that there is little (or no) demand for pine on these systems. These old versions will probably be removed before the end of the year (and people will then need to ssh over to a Linux, OSX or Solaris machine to run pine).

A new version of the cleanup script has been installed with some minor updates to make it more useful. Please run it on your home directory. It now uses bzip2 for compression (use bunzip2 to uncompress), if the command exists (otherwise it will use gzip). The brief summary is:

Cleanup does a pass over one or more directories checking for various files which should either be removed or compressed to save disk space.

No file is removed unless it has not been accessed (read) for at least 7 days. The files which are considered for removal are: emacs backups (~, #file#), gimp swap files (.gimpswap.*), .bak files where the base file exists, .o files, .dvi .log, .aux files where the .tex file exists, core, nohup.out and a.out files unaccessed for 28 days.

It also compresses core, nohup.out and a.out files unaccessed for 7 days and any uncompressed file over 100K which has not been read for over 28 days.

There are options to control some of these values, prompt before doing anything and a ``dummy'' mode where it just gives a summary of what savings could be expected. See the updated man page for details.

A new version of the cleanup script has been installed and the default values updated to make it more useful. Please run it on your home directory. The brief summary is.

Cleanup does a pass over one or more directories checking for various files which should either be removed or compressed to save disk space.

No file is removed unless it has not been accessed (read) for at least 7 days. The files which are considered for removal are: emacs backups (~, #file#), gimp swap files (.gimpswap.*), .bak files where the base file exists, .o files, .dvi .log, .aux files where the .tex file exists, core and a.out files unaccessed for 28 days.

It also compresses core and a.out files unaccessed for 7 days and any uncompressed file over 100K which has not been read for over 28 days.

There are options to control some of these values, prompt before doing anything and a ``dummy'' mode where it just gives a summary of what savings could be expected. See the updated man page for details.

A new faster (in most cases) version of the cleanup script has been installed and the default values altered to make it more useful. The brief summary is.

Cleanup does a pass over one or more directories checking for various files which should either be removed or compressed to save disk space.

No file is removed unless it has not been accessed (read) for at least 7 days. The files which are considered for removal are: emacs backups (~, #file#), .bak files where the base file exists, .o files, .dvi .log, .aux files where the .tex file exists, core and a.out files unaccessed for 28 days.

It also compresses core and a.out files unaccessed for 7 days and any file over 100K unaccessed for 28 days.

There are options to control some of these values, prompt before doing anything and a ``dummy'' mode where it just gives a summary of what savings could be expected. See the man page for details.

Please tidy up the files in your home directory. This applies just as much to those with their home directories on group owned systems, as to public disks.

Not removing or compressing old unwanted files, causes our backups to take up much more room, and take much longer. Unless some action is taken the present backup system will not be able to cope.

Those people who have multiple directories on different machines should check that they actually want to keep everything, and whether it all needs backing up. Large temporary data files are better stored in /home/scratch or /home/scratch2 than in your home directory.

Please run cleanup in your home directory.

The greed home disk filled up again recently causing the usual disruption. There are currently only about 2 Mbytes free. fear is also approaching the limit: there are about 40 Mbytes free. I have scanned the disks on fear and greed and found that for some users cleanup will save substantial amounts of disk space. cleanup deletes redundant emacs backups, .dvi files etc. and will compress large infrequently used files - see info item 301. Note that compression will not always save very much space but it's worth trying.

Please run cleanup on your home directory as soon as possible, preferably now. Will you also please review your disk usage and delete any other files which are unwanted.

We intend to have a purge of stagnant disk space on the public fileservers soon. Directories containing files which occupy large amounts of disk space and which have not been accessed for at least six months will be archived to tape and deleted from disk, unless the owner has plans to use the files again in the not too distant future.

The cleanup script which deletes old emacs backup files, .dvi files etc and compresses old core files and a.out files and deletes .o files and .aux files and compresses old files has been enhanced. It will now also delete .bak files (created by ispell) where the file exists, and very olf core and a.out files. I've also changed the time a file must be unread before cleanup will compress it. The full list is now:

delete ~ .~ #*# *.o files
delete .dvi .log .aux files when the .tex file exists delete .bak files when the master file exists delete core and a.out (even if compressed) files not read for over 21 days compress core and a.out files not read for over 2 days compress all files over 100K which have not been used (read, written or run) for over 21 days

As before the -i flag will cause cleanup to prompt before deleting any files, and -X for turning off compression of files and -O for preventing deletion of .o files. A new flag -c turns off deletion of old core and a.out files.

Please use it to tidy your home directory regularly.

The cleanup script which deletes old emacs backup files, .dvi files etc and compresses old core files and a.out files and deletes .o files and .aux files has been enhanced. It will now also compress all files (both executables and data) which have not been used for over 5 days and are over 100K in size. The list of what is done:

delete ~ .~ #*# *.o files
delete .dvi .log .aux files when the .tex file exists compress core and a.out files not read for over 2 days compress all files over 100K which have not been used (read, written or run) for over 5 days

The compression program used is "gzip -9" which is very good for many common files. It has also been tested on Linux as well as other machines (Sun, HP, DEC). As before the -i flag will cause cleanup to prompt before deleting any files, and -X for turning off compression of files and -O for preventing deletion of .o files.

Please use it to tidy your home directory regularly.

The cleanup script which deletes old emacs backup files, .dvi files etc and compresses old core files and a.out files has been enhanced to also delete .o files and .aux files. It will now also compress all executables which have not been used for over 5 days and are over 100K in size. The list of what is done:

delete ~ .~ #*# *.o files
delete .dvi .log .aux files when the .tex file exists compress core and a.out files not read for over 2 days compress all executables over 100K which have not been used in 5 days

The compression program used is "gzip -9" which is very good for most text files. The program also now prints out what it is doing, and has been tested on the DEC Alphas as well as the Sun3/4 and HP700 machines. As before the -i flag will cause cleanup to prompt before deleting any files.

There are now new flags -X and -O which turn off the compression of executables (useful for system directories) and the deletion of .o files (useful when the .o files would take a long time to rebuild and they are in common use.)

Please use it to tidy your home directory regularly.

A number of the disks holding home directories are starting to get full, which can prevent work being done by everyone using the machines. This is especially true on greed which is almost completely full. Many of these files are no doubt useful, but some of them are probably no longer needed, or are saved backups of files made by emacs or other editors.

If you no longer need files can you please delete them. If you aren't likely to use a file for some time, please consider either compressing it, or putting it on floppy disk or tape and deleting the copy in your home directory. For compressing files the command:

        /server1/gnu/bin/gzip -9 filename

achieves a much better compression than the standard unix compress command. In order to remove many unwanted files like emacs backups and .dvi files please run the command:

        cleanup

from time to time. See info item 170 for more information about cleanup.

A script which will tidy the contents of a directory and remove unwanted files is now available for HPs and Sun machines. The program called cleanup removes all old emacs ~ files, and any .dvi and .log files where the corresponding .tex file still exists. It also will gzip any 'core' or a.out files which have not been read for at least 2 days. As it runs the script will output the names and sizes of all files it deletes and gives the output of gzip of those files it compresses. Normally cleanup deletes the files quietly but if the -i flag is given then cleanup prompts before deleting anything (though not before compressing files since those can be simply undone.) If no directory is specified then the script will run on your entire home directory. E.g.

      $ cleanup -i .
      -rw-r--r--  1 jp107        2368 Aug 19 17:43 ./welcome.dvi
      rm: remove ./welcome.dvi? n
      -rw-r--r--  1 jp107         206 Aug 19 17:46 ./welcome.log
      rm: remove ./welcome.log? y

or

      $ cleanup
      -rwxr-xr-x  1 jp107         371 Mar  2  1992 /home/kronos/jp107/cmds/tidy~
      -rw-r--r--  1 jp107     8145728 Aug 15 12:33 /home/kronos/jp107/core
      /home/kronos/jp107/core: 99.6% -- replaced with /home/kronos/jp107/core.gz