Cleaning pacman Cache

Published 2016-06-15 | Go Back

I just learned how to clean pacman’s package cache.

I came across this wiki page when I was struggling with disk space the other day. It was then that I learned that pacman would keep all versions of downloaded packages, no matter whether the package is installed or not. Cleaning the cache is easy:

paccache -r

This will remove all cached versions except the most recent 3. There are more aggressive options as well mentioned in that wiki page, such as:

pacman -Sc

This will keep only the latest version for currently installed packages. Older versions and uninstalled packages will be removed. Of course, this is not recommended. However, as a fun fact, I used that command to regain over 22GB disk space.