COMPUTER-JANITOR(8) Ubuntu system administration COMPUTER-JANITOR(8)NAMEcomputer-janitor - clean up a system installation
SYNOPSIScomputer-janitor find
computer-janitor cleanup [--all] [CRUFT]...
computer-janitor ignore [CRUFT]...
computer-janitor unignore
computer-janitor-gtk [options] [CRUFT]...
DESCRIPTIONcomputer-janitor and computer-janitor-gtk find and remove cruft from
your system. The first one is a command line program, the latter has a
graphical user interface.
Cruft is anything that shouldn't be on the system, but is. Stretching
the definition, it is also things that should be on the system, but
aren't. Examples:
· Packages that were installed because something else depended on
them, but now nothing depends on them anymore. Typically this
includes large numbers of libraries.
· Packages that are no longer supported by the current release of
the operating system. This can, for example, be applications
whose development have stopped and that have no support, includ‐
ing no security support, anymore. Keeping such applications
installed can be dangerous.
· Configuration tweaks that are missing from the system, but which
would be there if the system was installed from scratch. For
example, mount options for filesystems: the relatime option is
an example.
computer-janitor has four modes of operation, invoked by the first non-
option word in the argument list.
· find searches for cruft and prints out a list of them. Each
piece of cruft is also tagged with it's state: ignored or remov‐
able.
· cleanup actually removes the cruft. It will remove those pieces
of cruft you name on the command line. If you want to remove
everything identified by find that is marked removable, you need
to use the --all option.
· ignore and unignore mark cruft as ignored or removable, respec‐
tively.
OPTIONS--all With the cleanup operation, remove all pieces of cruft that are
not ignored.
--state-file=FILE
Use FILE as the name of the state file, for persistent storage
of the state (ignored or removable) of each piece of cruft.
Default is /var/lib/computer-janitor/state.dat. Use /dev/null
to disable persistent storage of state.
--no-act
Don't actually remove anything, just pretend to do so. This is
useful for testing stuff.
--verbose
Be verbose: cause find to write a description of each piece of
cruft it finds, to help the user understand why understand why
the cruft is cruft.
EXIT STATUScomputer-janitor will return an exit code of 0 for successful operation
(no errors). It will return a non-zero exit code if there are any
errors. It is not an error to find cruft, or to not find cruft.
ENVIRONMENT
COMPUTER_JANITOR_DEBUG
Set this to yes to set the logging level to DEBUG rather than
INFO.
COMPUTER_JANITOR_PLUGINS
Set this to the directory in which computer-janitor should look
for plugins. The default is to look for them in /usr/share/com‐
puter-janitor/plugins.
FILES
/var/lib/computer-janitor/state.dat
This file stores the state of cruft: ignored or removable. It
only stores the state of cruft that have been state manipulated.
The state of cruft not mentioned in this file is removable.
/etc/computer-janitor.d
This directory contains whitelist files, which specify that cer‐
tain things are never cruft. A whitelist file has a name that
ends with .whitelist, and contains one name of cruft per line.
(Empty lines and lines beginning with # are ignored.)
EXAMPLE
To find all cruft on the system:
computer-janitor find
To remove a specific piece of cruft:
computer-janitor cleanup hello
To mark a piece of cruft as ignored, so that it isn't removed by
cleanup:
computer-janitor ignore hello
To remove the ignored status:
computer-janitor unignore hello
To remove all cruft that isn't ignored:
computer-janitor cleanup --all
SEE ALSOcomputer-janitor-gtk(8).
Ubuntu 2008-07-25 COMPUTER-JANITOR(8)
