Arch Linux: system maintenance

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Having a Linux machine is like having a baby. I personally am not a father but the point is the same: they need love, kind of. I have been using Linux since 2014, my first distro was Ubuntu and instantaneosly fell in love with the terminal. Years passed by and after trying several distros i landed on Arch Linux.as many out there. The following is my daily maintenance of my Arch Linux system.

Updating the system

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To update your Arch Linux system open your terminal and digit

sudo pacman -Syu

Logfiles

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Log files store all the process that take place in your machine. They can be found in /var/log. To stream errors in log files we will use the journalctl command that manipulates the data collected by journald daemon.

sudo journalctl -p 3 -xb

• -p : priorities, 3 stands for ’error'.
• -x: add explanatory messages if avaiable
• -b: boot. No entries means last booted system

Size of journal

du -sh /var/log/journal

To clean journal entries by time

sudo journalctl --vacuum-time=3weeks

If you want to automatize the process i share a simple script i wrote time ago

#! /bin/bash

journalpath='/var/log/journal/'
action=$(du -sh $journalpath | awk '{print $1}' | cut -d M -f1)

if [ $action -gt 500 ]; then
  journal --vacumm-time=2weeks
else
  echo "Space under 500M"
fi

You can set the size limit to the system journal by editing the file /etc/systemd/journald.conf. Search for the voice #SystemMaxUse=, uncomment it and set a size limit

SystemMaxUse=200M 

Pacman cache

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Pacman is the packet manager of Arch Linux and derived distros. Pacman packages can be found in /var/cache/pacman/pkg. Since pacman does not remove old packages we need a script called paccache. To perform a dryrun

sudo paccache -dr

to remove packages

sudo paccache -r

The above command keeps all the three recent versions of your installed packages and delete the older ones. If you want to keep the last two versions you can type

sudo paccache -rk2

Cache directory

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You can print the size of your .cache directory using the following command

du -sh ~/.cache

To find elements by time and delete them you can run

find ~/.cache -type f -atime +<number of days> -delete

Usually it is safe to free .cache space. Just be careful about the softwares installed.

Bleachbit

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Bleachbit is a free and open source privacy oriented tool used for cleaning disks. Install bleachbit

sudo pacman -S bleachbit

In conclusion

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These are simple recommendations to maintain your Arch distro. I hope people can find this guide useful and if you would like to share your thoughts feel free to contact me. You can find more about Arch maintenance here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/system_maintenance. See you soon!