Vanishing Disk space and cleanup

Hi All,
I have asked before but through a different route, about vanishing disk space on a Linux system only.
One of the biggest culprits is a folder called thumbnails (My Disk:/// thumbnails), here there are two folders
1)Normal
2)Fail
It is the folder called Normal that seems to hold a image file of everything I have done or program I have accessed on this AAO, I am continually deleting PNG`s from this folder but it is still over 3.5 MB in size.

So my question is can I just click select all > delete but keep the folder?

 

Hmm. I've just seen the same directories on mine too, although the size is hardly a problem. The .thumbnails directory takes up only 2.2 MB. Also, only a half-dozen or so have been created since December while the AA1 has been in use every day.

I don't know exactly why they're being created, but my guess is xfce is creating them as a cache to speed loading times when you open the file manager and such. In which case it's probably safe to delete them, although they will keep returning.

I don't know a lot about xfce, nor am I even 100% sure it's the culprit although that would be a fair guess since a lot of my thumbnails are icons and things that I won't have loaded in any picture viewer. You could put a simple bash script into a cron job to regularly empty the directory though. A couple of commands to delete all the files in both fail and normal would suffice, set to run once a day.

I must stress again that I'm not certain about any of this, but if you have been deleting thumbnails from these directories all the time, with no noticeable negative effect, then this would certainly be a good way to automate it. But really, is a few MB really bothering you that much, even on the tiny 8GB SSD?

By the way, from the terminal you can use 'du -shc <directory>' command to see how much space <directory> is taking up on the drive.

 

I am runing ubuntu 8.10 and i delete that folder regulary, no problem because is created again...

 

Hi Huw & jango,

Thank you for the help, I just needed confirmation that deletion of the folder would not cause issues so will try this route.