Re: cleanup disk space

[Heavenly Avenger <avenger at avenger dot ws>]

Hello! I maybe am getting the message underway and I don't see the 
history on the message itself, and you seem to be replying somebody that 
posted a question before I joined the list.

But I believe that if space is a concern there are two main points I can 
think of:

- Selectively installing only packages you need. I do this myself, get 
rid of any x, gtk, kde, gnome related stuff
- Using NTFS compression. You can do this by a per-folder level and 
compress just given folders (or files) "in-place" without making it 
unable to run/open the files. NTFS does this compression transparent to 
the user -- at the cost of additional CPU cycles to decompress the file 
when a read is attempted.

To enable NTFS compression, you can do it for the whole disk. Open 
explorer, right-click disk, properties, and check the "compress this 
drive to save disk space" in the dialog that is displayed.

You can do this for specific files/folders by right-clicking them, 
clicking 'properties', then 'advanced' and then checking the 
compression-specific checkbox that's displayed.

This should go smoothly with cygwin... but nowadays I believe the space 
cygwin spends is negligible comparing to the size of the available disks...

Zipping the files with bzip2/gzip/whatever may work for some editors 
that know to expand the files before opening, but that won't be the case 
in the majority of the applications. The transparent and native 
compression should be the best shot to shrink a big and cluttered cygwin 
installation in no time. Again, for the (potential) cost of performance.

Hope this helps!


On 7/10/2018 1:10 AM, bzs@theworld.com wrote:
> I hesitate to jump in here but what about the common compression
> programs cygwin provides like bzip2 and xz?
>
> Maybe everyone knows about them and clearly you can't do this on files
> you actually need to use (e.g., executables, tho looking at /usr/bin
> some are 20MB each and if you know you don't actually run them
> ever...) And even an error can generally be undone with a simple
> uncompress command within reason. Don't compress the respective
> uncompress command!
>
> And zip and tar can be used to package up entire directories or
> wildcard matched files in one command.
>
> And if you find you really don't miss what you packed up they can be
> moved off disk entirely to a thumb drive or CD/DVD or whatever for
> more savings tho that's also true of the uncompressed versions but zip
> or tar archives are particularly handy for this.
>
> Maybe it's too obvious, apologies.


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