I've installed a bunch of perl modules via CPAN, and SBo packages for things like LibreOffice and SpamAssassin. I therefore have lots of downloaded source files in my SBo build directory, package tgz files in /tmp, more SBo build working files in /tmp/SBo, and files in ~/.cpan/build and ~/.cpan/sources. These all take quite a bit of space and I'm wondering if I need to keep all this stuff or if I can delete most or all of it.

Thoughts?

For SlackBuild packages, you can safely delete everything in /tmp/SBo/ and you can remove any packages generated from SBo that reside in /tmp/. That's why they're in /tmp/. Ideally, nothing should reside in /tmp/ that can cause system problems if removed (on a reboot... some programs rely on /tmp/ files while they run like pulseaudio). Once the packages are generated, you don't need the files in /tmp/SBo/ anymore, and once those packages are installed to your system, you don't need the packages anymore (unless you want to install them for another system or save them if you ever intend to wipe 14.2 and reinstall the same version).

As for cpan stuff, I imagine it is the same, but I am not knowledgeable enough to say for certain.

OK, will wipe SBo temp stuff!

Does anyone have advice on CPAN?

You should consider using cpan2tgz so you can manage perl modules as slackware packages, using standard slackware tools and packages managers.

I'll investigate how that works, but the immediate problem I see with that is dependencies. For example, spamassassin with SBo has well over a dozen sub-dependencies nested to 3 or more levels. Since yer basic SlackBuild doesn't recursively retrieve and build dependencies, that ends up being a lot of work -- I know firsthand. I have heard about tools such as sbopkg and sboinstall which are reputed to deal with dependencies, but I haven't experimented with any of those. By contrast, installing spamassassin using CPAN is as simple as `cpan -i Mail::SpamAssassin`. Yes, there are 3 dependencies that is misses for some reason, but it is a matter of seconds to cpan those.

So, while I appreciate your suggestion and will do more spare-time investigating of that and the tools I mentioned, I'm still asking about CPAN cleanup to anyone who might know. For one thing, spamassassin and other perl modules are already installed using CPAN and I'm not about to uninstall and start over.

While on the subject of clean-up. I have a root/.ccache/ directory that is 2.1G. My research indicates this is only for caching C program workfiles. Mine is not a C development machine and these files got there only because I've installed packages which I'm unlikely to need to re-do on any frequent basis. Am I safe to remove these?

In $HOME/.cache/mozilla I have 8049 files, though only occupying 117M. Do these go away after some period of time? I don't see any settings in Firefox for cache retention.

You have failed to include all the work you had to do to fix those segfaults -- and indeed the work other people had to do on your behalf -- as a cost of the way you are using CPAN. If you're not prepared to look at a better way of working, you can't really expect other people to subsidise your current way of working in the future.

From cpan2tgz FAQ: