Today I had no space remaining in the disk while I was upgrading my EndeavourOS system, so I had to look up for ways to free some space.

The first idea was to do away with the cached pacman packages. It stores all packages you’ve downloaded recently, so it seems to be a good idea to run this command every now and then:

sudo pacman -Sc

The command above cleans up cached packages that are no longer installed. That command alone freed up 22 GB in my case.

Clean up unused dependencies

The next thing I tried was a tip from Giorgos Dimtsas on how to remove unused dependencies. To my surprise, I learned that when you remove a package with pacman, its dependencies are not automatically deleted as well.

You can check the unused packages by running the following command:

sudo pacman -Qtdq

where:

• -Q or --query queries the packages database
• -t or --unrequired prints only packages that are neither required nor optionally required by any currently installed package
• -d or --deps restricts output to packages installed as dependencies
• -q or --quiet shows package names only

By typing the command above, you can see which unused packages are still installed in your system. To remove them, you can plug the output of the command above onto pacman’s command to remove packages, like this:

sudo pacman -Rs $(pacman -Qtdq)

The -s or --recursive tells pacman to remove the specified package (or packages) and all of their dependencies, provided that they are not required by other packages and were not explicitly installed by the user.