What's `/var/cache/pkgfile/`?

I have installed packages only by pacman for official and pacman -U for aur.
/var/cache/pkgfile/ takes a lot of disk spaces, what is it?

$ ls -lh /var/cache/pkgfile/
total 406M
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 299M  8月 22 00:00 community.files
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  18M  8月 19 00:00 core.files
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  89M  8月 20 00:00 extra.files
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 547K  8月 19 00:00 multilib.files

Its the databases that contains information about every file owned by a package. So they are pretty big.

Wrong! pacman doesn’t deal with AUR packages. Our pamac does. The pacman -U is when you install/update a package from different source and you point to it …

In Pamac UI Preferences you can set the number of packages to keep in cache

Or clean them.

package pkgfile is installed, used only in bash config for “command not found”

So is the folder part of pacman and can not be deleted?

I’ve cleaned all in tab General & tab ThirdParty, but /var/cache/pkgfile/ is not affected.

That is the database for the official repositories

You can delete them, but they will be re-downloaded on next update anyway, so there’s no point in deleting them.

is not pacman but pkgfile package !
this package use a systemd timer

pacman -Fl pkgfile
pkgfile usr/lib/systemd/system/pkgfile-update.service
pkgfile usr/lib/systemd/system/pkgfile-update.timer
pkgfile usr/share/doc/pkgfile/command-not-found.bash
pkgfile usr/share/doc/pkgfile/command-not-found.fish
pkgfile usr/share/doc/pkgfile/command-not-found.zsh
pkgfile var/cache/pkgfile/

package used for example by manjaro-zsh-config


“command not found” not useful for you ?
run pactree -r pkgfile
only if result is “pkgfile” you can un-install it, else disable timer

1 Like

When uninstall zsh, it uninstalls pkgfile by default.
After uninstalling zsh & pkgfile, and delete /var/cache/pkgfile/, the system still knows about pkgfile as below

$ pacman -Fl pkgfile
pkgfile usr/
pkgfile usr/bin/
pkgfile usr/bin/pkgfile
pkgfile usr/lib/
pkgfile usr/lib/systemd/
pkgfile usr/lib/systemd/system/
pkgfile usr/lib/systemd/system/pkgfile-update.service
pkgfile usr/lib/systemd/system/pkgfile-update.timer
pkgfile usr/share/
pkgfile usr/share/bash-completion/
pkgfile usr/share/bash-completion/completions/
pkgfile usr/share/bash-completion/completions/pkgfile
pkgfile usr/share/doc/
pkgfile usr/share/doc/pkgfile/
pkgfile usr/share/doc/pkgfile/command-not-found.bash
pkgfile usr/share/doc/pkgfile/command-not-found.fish
pkgfile usr/share/doc/pkgfile/command-not-found.zsh
pkgfile usr/share/licenses/
pkgfile usr/share/licenses/pkgfile/
pkgfile usr/share/licenses/pkgfile/LICENSE
pkgfile usr/share/man/
pkgfile usr/share/man/man1/
pkgfile usr/share/man/man1/pkgfile.1.gz
pkgfile usr/share/zsh/
pkgfile usr/share/zsh/site-functions/
pkgfile usr/share/zsh/site-functions/_pkgfile
pkgfile var/
pkgfile var/cache/
pkgfile var/cache/pkgfile/

It’s not as expected, is it?

BTW

  • /usr/share/zsh/ needs to be deleted manully
  • zsh is the default shell in the recent offical installer of manjaro, I think it’s ok to change the default shell for a better one, but I can’t understand why zsh depends like this, it’s not good, especially as a default shell, right?

Yes, since pacman -F does not look which files are located on your system, it uses the repository database for it’s output.

Never do that. Other packages place files in that folder to add additional functions to zsh. It will be restored if these packages get an update.

The zsh packages does not depend on it. Just the special Manjaro config package for zsh need it. You can use zsh without this config package.

2 Likes

Fine

Too late, I’ve deleted it. Without zsh, how could the files in the folder be useful?

That’s ok

Thanks very much

They are completely unnecessary files if zsh is not installed. But since packages are usually not split in the Arch World, you get these files if you want or not.

1 Like

Are there bad consequences to choosing to keep 0? That means there’s only the latest version?

No, that is why is still an option, but you will not be able do downgrade from cache in case you will need to do that for some reason …

1 Like

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