Yum indigestion

Yum (Yellow Dog Updater Modified) has become a standard tool in Red Hat (and CentOS) Linux. It replaced the aging up2date tool for installing, updating, and deleting packages.

While yum brought a number of improvements, it also brought a hidden problem: the dbcache.

Yum archives downloaded packages/updates and tracks them with sqlite files in /var/yum/cache. Downloaded packages are not automatically deleted, and neither are the cache files, which can chew up a lot of disk space over time. The remedy is to periodically delete the cache files with:

yum clean dbcache

To remove downloaded packages, use:

yum clean packages

To remove cache, packages, and metadata (must be downloaded again the next time yum is run), use:

yum clean all