Regain Disk Space from Homebrew
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
:

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!
![Regular Expressions for the Rest of Us]()
Sooner or later you'll run across a regular expression. With their cryptic syntax, confusing documentation and massive learning curve, most developers settle for copying and pasting them from StackOverflow and hoping they work. But what if you could decode regular expressions and harness their power? In...
![fetch API]()
One of the worst kept secrets about AJAX on the web is that the underlying API for it, XMLHttpRequest
, wasn't really made for what we've been using it for. We've done well to create elegant APIs around XHR but we know we can do better. Our effort to...
![Flext: MooTools Auto-Growing Textrea Plugin]()
A while back David Walsh published a list of
7 MooTools Plugins You Should Use on Every Website
which included 'AutoGrow' a text area expander plugin. 'AutoGrow' is very similar in results to the class I wrote for Education.com, Flext. I decided to release this...
![Downloadify: Client-Side File Generation Using JavaScript and Flash]()
The following tools is in its very beta stages and works intermittently. Its so damn useful that I had to show it off now though!
I recently stumbled upon Downloadify, a client-side file generation tool based on JavaScript and Flash ActionScript code. A...
Just dropping a huge thank you for sharing this!
another thank you.. just saved ~2gb.
==> This operation has freed approximately 1.9GB of disk space.
df -==> This operation has freed approximately 562.3MB of disk space.
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?
mauvedeity : scrub the cache, I guess