Tidy-rpm-cache

tidy-rpm-cache.py (previous rm_obsolete_rpms.py)

We can download latest version of tidy-rpm from internet and then use it to delete obsolete packages from yum-cahce. This script saves considerable disk-space and keeps only latest version of files in cache / repository.

To see list of obsolete RPMs inside a directory recursively and then get option of deleting obsolete RPMs use:

tidy-rpm-cache.py --dir=/var/cache/yum

Information on rm_obsolete_rpms

Normally yum packages are stored in sub-directories inside '/var/cache/yum' and they occupy lot of space. Multiple versions of updates / install files for same package can be present in yum cache which leads to wastage of hard-disk space. We may want to keep only the latest versions in cache so that we can copy cache to other machine and avoid re-download of package over internet. But for this we do not need older versions of packages.

Hence to selectively remove older versions of packages we can use 'rm_obsolete_rpms' python script.

If we use this script on 64-bit systems than it cannot understand that both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of package must be kept. Hence we can run the script as:

./rm_pbsolete_rpms -n 1 -d /var/cache/yum

so that on 64-bit systems last two version of packages are kept. In this case both 64-bit and 32-bit versions of package are left and only older versions are deleted from cache.