Cleaning pacman Cache
Published
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.