Prune Portage tree

In the months I've been using Gentoo, I've had very little trouble with package management via the Portage system. My portage tree is starting to consume a large portion of disk space, though; I've even had to give /usr/portage its own filesystem, which is now nearly full. Can I safely empty the /usr/portage directory without affecting the functionality of my installed software or the integrity of the portage system?

I would suggest you spend some time on the gentoo forums
You may not be surprised to learn you are not the first to ask this question.
It is an *extremely* good community.

You can safely remove the packages in the /usr/portage/distfiles/ directory.
That directorty holds all the sources you donwload and so if you delete any of them you have to download it again if you want reinstall/modify the package ...

To a better way to this check
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.p...er=asc&start=0


Its also safe to remove the files in /var/tmp/portage/ and in /var/tmp/portage-pkg/ as these dirs only holds temp archives of the compillation process ..

Note that all this info was learned from the gentoo forum and take a look at it as syg00 said is always helpfull ...

I hadn't noticed until you mentioned it that the distfile directory is what's really taking up all the space anyway. /var/tmp/portage is also rather large, though I find it rather curious it seemingly hasn't flushed itself EVER, if it really is a "temp" directory.

Anyway, thanks for the help. I'll be sure to explore the Gentoo forums for more information.