How to clean up unnecessary files

hard-drive

Please suggest me any particular unnecessary file that I can clean to back everything to normal condition(temporarily). (i.e. any log or archieve or anything ). My var/log has only 40MB and Home directory has 3GB of space(so I believe that's not a problem). Other than that what I can clean up to make space.

[user@host]$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vg_inamivm-lv_root
                       18G   17G     0 100% /
tmpfs                 1.9G     0  1.9G   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1             485M   71M  389M  16% /boot

Solution 1:

To clean some packages laying around, run the following:

sudo apt-get autoremove
sudo apt-get clean
sudo apt-get autoclean

If you are in search for a more in depth cleaning, use the Ubuntu Tweak Utility.

Install

The Ubuntu Tweak Stable PPA by Ding Zhou, support Ubuntu 7.10 till 14.04.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tualatrix/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-tweak

Usage

Click the janitor tab, select what you want to scan, check what you want to delete, and then press the clean button to cleanse your system.

ubuntu-tweak-janitor

Solution 2:

The spacesaver technique

sudo apt-get autoremove
sudo apt-get autoclean
sudo apt-get clean

As well as use the tool bleachbit which will be the awesome space saver. It will save atleast 1GB of space and will bring you into surprise. Use the tool in both regular and superuser mode.This can be installed by using the command

sudo apt-get install bleachbit

Run the command as

sudo bleachbit
bleachbit

Solution 3:

None of this worked trimming logs also did nothing. Being a long time nodejs usage on this system I also use 'n' to install latest version of node. I found a way to purge the old versions.

n prune

This returned 25% of an 8G VDI

Solution 4:

I have made a python script to clean Debian based Distros.

Here is the link : OS Cleaner

This sript will clear the :

packages that are no longer required
Clean up APT cache
systemd journal logs
Clean the thumbnail cache

You can also check the garbage storages!