Regain Disk Space from Homebrew

By  on  

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!

Recent Features

  • By
    9 Mind-Blowing WebGL Demos

    As much as developers now loathe Flash, we're still playing a bit of catch up to natively duplicate the animation capabilities that Adobe's old technology provided us.  Of course we have canvas, an awesome technology, one which I highlighted 9 mind-blowing demos.  Another technology available...

  • By
    Creating Scrolling Parallax Effects with CSS

    Introduction For quite a long time now websites with the so called "parallax" effect have been really popular. In case you have not heard of this effect, it basically includes different layers of images that are moving in different directions or with different speed. This leads to a...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Optimize Your Links For Print Using CSS — Show The URL

    When moving around from page to page in your trusty browser, you get the benefit of hovering over links and viewing the link's target URL in the status bar. When it comes to page printouts, however, this obviously isn't an option. Most website printouts...

  • By
    iPad Detection Using JavaScript or PHP

    The hottest device out there right now seems to be the iPad. iPad this, iPad that, iPod your mom. I'm underwhelmed with the device but that doesn't mean I shouldn't try to account for such devices on the websites I create. In Apple's...

Discussion

  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. 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

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!