Blog O’ Matty

Cleaning up space used by the OpenSolaris pkg utility

I’ve been experimenting with the new OpenSolaris package manager (pkg), and ran into an odd issue last weekend. The flash drive I was running image-update on filled up, and after poking around I noticed that /var/pkg had some large directories:

$ cd /var/pkg

$ du -sh *

4.6M    catalog
1.5K    cfg_cache
892M    download
1.5K    file
4.5K    history
19M     index
1.5K    lost+found
146M    pkg
318K    state

In this specific case, pkg downloaded close to 900MB to the download directory, but failed to remove the downloaded files once the image was updated. :( The pkg tool currently doesn’t have a purge option to remove old stuff in this directory, so I had to go in manually and remove everything in the download directory. It appears bug #2266 is open to address this, and removing the contents from the download directory is safe (at least according to a post I read on the pkg mailing list). I think I prefer yum to the pkg tool, but hopefully I can be swayed once pkg matures a bit more!