How to clean /var/cache?

When I woke up this morning, I found my root had filled overnight

du -hx --max-depth=1 / 132M /boot 4.0K /media 16K /lost+found 16M /root 702M /lib 4.0K /OLDHOME 8.2G /usr 73M /etc 4.0K /srv 11M /sbin 4.0K /selinux 8.0K /.config 4.0K /cdrom 4.6G /var 181M /opt 4.0K /mnt 9.3M /bin 4.0K /lib64 14G / 

The space is used by /var/cache/polipo (2.7G). How can I clean this up safely?
I tried restarts=>didn't work
Used bleachbit=>the space is not detected in the cleanup preview

PS: I did rm -rf youtube inside /var/cache/polipo and it freed up 2G space. Dunno if it was safe though

6 Answers

Method 1:

sudo apt-get autoclean sudo apt-get autoremove 

Method 2:

Launch your bleachbit as root user : no space in disk; sudo apt-get clean not working

Polipo, a web caching program may store a lot of data in an on-disk cache.

One way to clear this up is to issue the command sudo polipo -x - this will cause polipo to clear the local disk cache.

The most powerful of all commands to clean the cache for command line users is of course

sudo apt clean 

Which will also delete all the cached files.

Try cleaning ubuntu unnecesarry files using bleachbit. It is a tool that will help you clean your cache, temp files, cookies and it has other features also...

To install it:

sudo apt-get install bleachbit 

It sounds so obvious, and yet chances are you haven’t done this.

By default Ubuntu keeps every update it downloads and installs in a cache on your disk, just in case you ever need it again.

This is useful if you regularly add and remove apps, find yourself needing to reconfigure/reinstall a specific package, or simply have a poor connection.

But the flip side is that the apt package cache can quickly swell to several hundred MBs. This command tells you how big your apt cache is:

du -sh /var/cache/apt/archives 

To clean the apt cache on Ubuntu simply run the following command.

sudo apt-get clean 

The apt clean command removes ALL packages kept in the apt cache, regardless of age or need. If you’re on a slow, capped or intermittent connection you may want to consider skipping this step.

Source.

Go to settings > privacy > File history & Trash scroll down and click delete temporary files.