archive folder /usr/share/man
I have Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. There seem to be thousands of gzip archive files, eg stored under the /usr/share/man folder and its sub-folders, which I'd like to get rid of as they just clutter up my drive. There are many more also listed under /usr/share/doc folder and sub-folders and many other places besides these examples.
Is it safe to delete all of these gz files or would they ever be needed by the system?
01 Answer
At first I'll quote the steeldriver's comment:
It's a bad idea to manually delete any files installed by the package manager - it will get confused.
I'm completely agree with it.
Then let's discuss the filesizes problem. I'm writing this from the Ubuntu MATE 16.04.6 LTS with many applications installed.
Even on it I have the following:
$ du -sh /usr/share/man 72M /usr/share/man
But /usr/share/doc is bigger:
$ du -sh /usr/share/doc 2,3G /usr/share/doc
But why does /usr/share/doc is bigger? Let's run ncdu on this folder:
$ sudo ncdu /usr/share/doc ncdu 1.11 ~ Use the arrow keys to navigate, press ? for help --- /usr/share/doc ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1,5 GiB [##########] /texlive-doc 153,3 MiB [# ] /gnuradio-doc 67,3 MiB [ ] /fp-docs 25,3 MiB [ ] /kde 23,9 MiB [ ] /eagle 22,8 MiB [ ] /python-cherrypy3 20,0 MiB [ ] /libopenscap-dev 15,7 MiB [ ] /octave-htmldoc 13,6 MiB [ ] /nautilus-actions 13,4 MiB [ ] /gcc-4.8-base 13,0 MiB [ ] /uhd-host 10,8 MiB [ ] /HTML 9,4 MiB [ ] /maxima-doc 9,3 MiB [ ] /avr-libc 8,1 MiB [ ] /libx11-dev 7,2 MiB [ ] /libjanino-java 7,1 MiB [ ] /virtualbox-5.1 6,7 MiB [ ] /openjdk-8-jre-headless 6,2 MiB [ ] /python-logilab-common 5,7 MiB [ ] /graphviz 5,3 MiB [ ] /mibrfcs 5,2 MiB [ ] /asymptote-doc 5,2 MiB [ ] /ngspice-doc 4,7 MiB [ ] /autoconf-archive 4,5 MiB [ ] /liblcms2-dev 4,2 MiB [ ] /octave-doc 3,9 MiB [ ] /groff-base 3,8 MiB [ ] /latex2html 3,3 MiB [ ] /libgnuinet-java 3,1 MiB [ ] /texstudio 2,9 MiB [ ] /libsane 2,9 MiB [ ] /dblatex 2,8 MiB [ ] /dia 2,6 MiB [ ] /android 2,6 MiB [ ] /gcc-4.6-base 2,4 MiB [ ] /mesa-common-dev Total disk usage: 2,2 GiB Apparent size: 2,0 GiB Items: 98961
So here I have about 1.5 Gb of useful stuff from TeXLive with TeX templates and documentation.
If you do not have TeXLive installed, then this folder would be smaller.
You should also know that both folders are used by Help browser for GNOME named Yelp from yelp package. So you can read many official documents offline.
If you open it, then:
press Ctrl+L and write here
man:man(or call Yelp from terminal withyelp man:man) then you will get man-page formancommand -navigate to All Help then you will get many html-based help pages -
So these folders are very useful for offline use.
But if you are really know what are you doing, then you can remove documentation-only packages (having -doc suffix) with command like:
sudo apt purge $(dpkg -l | grep -- '-doc\b' | awk '{print $2}')(on my system it plans to remove 1 444 MB, in which are 1 086 MB for TexLive-related and 358 MB for others)
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