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Regain Disk Space from Homebrew

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One of my favorite utilities is Homebrew, the shell utility for installing and upgrading other utilities -- it's a lazy developer's dream.  Dreams can easily turn to nightmares, however, and I recently learned that Homebrew caches older versions of installed packages, leading to loads of disk space being used up by old files.

Want all of that disk space back?  Run brew cleanup -s:

Homebrew cleanup

I understand why Homebrew keeps the previous versions around but when utilities are stable, it's really time to take back the bytes.  My first run of brew cleanup -s recovered 640MB of disk space, which is peanuts relative to the size of modern hard drives, but it's space that I want back!

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  1. Nelson Rocha

    Just dropping a huge thank you for sharing this!

    ==> This operation has freed approximately 6.9GB of disk space.
  2. gn0st1c

    another thank you.. just saved ~2gb.

    ==> This operation has freed approximately 1.9GB of disk space.

  3. dorian logan

    df -==> This operation has freed approximately 562.3MB of disk space.

  4. mauvedeity

    I got about 32.2GB back on my laptop, which out of a 250GB drive is a chunk of space worth having. That also might explain why my Time Machine backups were always much bigger than I was expecting. Thanks for the tip. One question: I didn’t include the “-s” parameter – what does that do?

    • Andres

      mauvedeity : scrub the cache, I guess

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