Gaining Disk Space with cargo clean

I just got the Gnome notification that my SSD once again runs out of free disk space. This has happened before. Ususally I just clean up my pacman/pacaur cache with

pacaur -Sc

and run a few Docker cleanup commands.

This time, this didn’t give me much free space, as only ~5GB were freed. So I started baobab to analyze my disk. To my surprise, a large portion of disk space is consumed by my rust projects directory. The directory contains 55 subdirectories (projects), which sum up to ~50GB of disk space.

So I decided to run cargo clean on all these projects to get rid of large files I don’t need at the moment (I can recompile at any time, anyway).

for proj in $(find . -name Cargo.toml | xargs readlink -f | xargs dirname); do pushd $proj; cargo clean; popd; done

And voilà! The rust directory shrunk to 1.1GB, getting rid of 49GB of unneeded storage.