MEPIS Community Forum

I would like to create a null directory similar to /dev/null that I could symlink to the ~/.thumbnails/large and ~/.thumbnails/normal directories. Over the course of a day, Dolphin fills both of these directories with garbage. I tried changing permissions to make them read-only, but then my ~/.xsession-errors file fills up as Dolphin repeatedly tries to write to read-only directories.

My aim is to let Dolphin write to ~/.thumbnails directories, but make both of them black holes. Does anyone have a suggestion on how to do this?

symlink the large and normal directories to /dev/null might work...

EDIT: if you have THAT MANY files being added to these directories, setting these to some black hole like /dev/null or something similar may result in a performance hit.

using a tool like bleachbit, like rich suggested, may well be the better option

Off topic, but I use bleachbit to delete the .thumbnail directories on a regular basis, along with other crud that builds up.

I just used Bleachbit, only to find that most web sites (using Seamonkey) then visited failed to load graphics. Logging off and on again immediately solved that.

Bleachbit is highly configurable. Apparently an option was enabled that caused your issue. Not sure which, one, maybe browser cache.

I set up symlinks to /dev/null and that seems to work, although I'm a little leery about changing the attributes from directories to files. I'll keep a close eye on ~/.xsession-errors to see if errors pile up as a result.

EDIT:

Duplicate copies of the same .png files pile up in the ~/.thumbnails directories, causing them to bloat beyond reason. This seems totally pointless, and performance doesn't suffer by defeating this. I believe ~/.thumbnails is a carry-over from the time when computers were slow and RAM was limited. With today's fast, modern computers with huge RAM capacities, it just isn't necessary to cache image files this way.

I used bleachbit once, and my desktop immediately became unstable. Restoring partition images of /home and / fixed the problem, but I don't want to repeat that experience.

Never had an issue with bleachbit running as user or root.

Users' experiences are somewhat mixed, as doing a search on "bleachbit" in these forums shows.

I suspect it is what options one chooses to enable. Some are quite draconian in "cleaning". And I would agree if you enable an option that may cause serious issues the application is not that safely used.

Keep us posted on the result of your /dev/null solution. I dislike the buildup of those thumbnail files as well and a different solution would be welcome.

You might create a simple script to remove files in the ~/.thumbnails/large & ~/.thumbnails/normal directories (like the one below) and have it run as a cron job at whatever interval you want (daily, hourly, every 15 minutes, etc).



I don't have that much experience in setting up cron jobs but it doesn't look too difficult. I found one guide here: http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/how-do-i-a ... unix-oses/. Btw, is there a KDE4 program for creating/managing cron jobs?