January 2023 • Linux Tips

Review: Ubuntu Cleaner

In today’s article, we’re going to review a piece of software known as ‘Ubuntu Cleaner’. It won’t be a very long article, as there’s not much to cover – as it’s fairly self-explanatory. If you’re interested in learning about ‘Ubuntu Cleaner’ then this is the article for you.

As the name implies, this software is designed to work with Ubuntu. You may find that it works fine with Ubuntu derivatives. It may also work with the various official Ubuntu flavors – in part or in whole. But, the key here is ‘Ubuntu’. It’s software designed for Ubuntu. If you don’t use Ubuntu, this may not be the software for you.

I guess this isn’t a review so much as it is making folks aware of Ubuntu Cleaner. It’s reasonably easy and safe, so it seemed like a good idea to share this with Linux-Tip’s Ubuntu users.

About ‘Ubuntu Cleaner’:

You’ll find that ‘Ubuntu Cleaner‘ does more or less what you’d expect it to do. In many ways, it’s similar to BleachBit. Though, you’ll sometimes read stories of people using BleachBit and hosing their systems. That’s extremely unlikely to happen with ‘Ubuntu Cleaner’.

In short, you’ll see that this application cleans your system. It deletes files you don’t need, reducing the amount of disk space used. It cleans the following things at the push of a button:

Clear browser cache
Clear APT cache
Clear thumbnail cache
Remove unneeded packages
Remove old kernels
Remove old installers

So, ‘Ubuntu Cleaner’ is a system cleaner. If you’re curious about the browser cache, it appears to work with Firefox and the major Chrome/Chromium-based browsers. It did not seem to recognize the Snap version of Firefox, but that could be a problem at my end or something they’re working on.

You can see that it clears other things, like running the APT commands you’d consider running manually. If you have extra kernels installed, it’ll remove them – leaving one kernel version as a backup.

But, it does what it says it does on the label, it cleans Ubuntu.

Installing/Using ‘Ubuntu Cleaner’:

It’s easy enough to install ‘Ubuntu Cleaner’ in Ubuntu. You will need an open terminal. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With your terminal now open, simply follow the directions to install ‘Ubuntu Cleaner’ on their project page. I’ll copy them here, but be aware that things change and these installation directions may change:

sudo apt install software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gerardpuig/ppa
sudo apt update
sudo apt install ubuntu-cleaner

sudo apt install software-properties-common

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gerardpuig/ppa

sudo apt update

sudo apt install ubuntu-cleaner

Then, open ‘Ubuntu Cleaner’ from your applications list and the rest is pretty obvious. On the left side of the screen, select the category of items you want to clean. On the right side, select the specifics you wish to have cleaned with ‘Ubuntu Cleaner’. When you’re done picking, push the button to clean your Ubuntu system. It’s not complicated, and looks like this:

Ubuntu Cleaner in action. — It’s pretty easy to understand how to use Ubuntu Cleaner.

See? It’s not all that complicated and it does what you’d expect it to do. It cleans Ubuntu’s system files – including your browser cache.

Thoughts and Closure:

These are all things you could manually clean yourself, including being able to run commands to remove your APT cache and the likes. But, if you’re one of those people who likes to stay on top of removing unused system files, this might be an application you’d like to use – assuming you’re an Ubuntu user.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I suppose I can rate it a 9. The application could do more, but it doesn’t need to. It does what it says on the tin and there’s little risk of it harming your system. Ubuntu Cleaner is a safe and effective way for Ubuntu users to remove system files.

If you’re an Ubuntu user, go ahead and install it. If you use an official Ubuntu flavor or a derivative, you can also try installing it – but it may not do things like remove the thumbnail cache. You can give it a shot. It’s unlikely to break anything.

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

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[Total: 9 Average: 4.8]

Rename A File Downloaded With ‘wget’

In today’s article, we’re going to learn how to rename a file downloaded with ‘wget’. This will not be a complicated article. It will also be a pretty short article. If you want to learn how to rename a file downloaded with ‘wget’, read on and you’ll see how!

Often, you’ll use ‘wget’ to download a file and it will have some sort of convoluted file name. You can download a file with ‘wget’ and rename it automatically. If this is something you’re interested in doing, we’ll learn how to do it in this article.

We’ve used ‘wget before. See:

How To: Hide The Output From wget
Make wget Use IPv4 or IPv6
How To: Make ‘wget’ Ignore Certificate Errors

We’ve used ‘wget’ in other articles, so feel free to use the search function to see the other articles about ‘wget’.

If you’re curious, you can check the man page. You’ll see ‘wget’ defines itself as:

Wget – The non-interactive network downloader.

That’s a good enough description, I suppose. Basically, you use ‘wget’ in the terminal to download files. It’s a pretty handy application and, importantly, a pretty universal application. If you’re using a GNU/Linux desktop (or server), you’ve almost certainly got ‘wget’ as an available tool.

So then…

Rename A File Downloaded With ‘wget’:

This article requires an open terminal, like many other articles on this site. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

Let’s ensure you have ‘wget’ installed with:

wget -V

wget -V

If ‘wget’ is not installed, install it from your package manager. Once installed, you can take it on a test run:

wget https://linux-tips.us/files/rnd-num.txt

1	wget https://linux-tips.us/files/rnd-num.txt

Now, we’re going to make ‘wget’ keep trying in case the download has issues. We’ll use the -c (continue) flag:

wget -c https://linux-tips.us/files/rnd-num.txt

1	wget -c https://linux-tips.us/files/rnd-num.txt

You probably don’t need the -c flag for this file, but it’s a good habit to get into. If we add the -O flag (for output-document) to the command, it’d look like this:

wget -cO <download_url> > <new_file_name>

1	wget -cO <download_url> > <new_file_name>

Or, to try to make it more clear:

wget -cO https://linux-tips.us/files/rnd-num.txt > numbers.txt

1	wget -cO https://linux-tips.us/files/rnd-num.txt > numbers.txt

In the latter example, you’ll have downloaded the file and renamed it to numbers.txt instead of saving it as the original filename. See? Pretty simple!

Closure:

There you have it. You have a new article. This time, we’ve learned how to rename a file downloaded with wget. It’s a handy trick to keep in mind, as people tend to want to give their files names with things like version information and all that. If you want a simpler file name, this is a nice easy way to do it.

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Disallow Directory Listing (in the terminal)

In today’s article, and for no apparent reason, we’re going to learn how to disallow directory listing in the terminal. This seems like a good article for beginners to learn, and it seems like something most folks might like to know. So, if you want to disallow directory listing read on!

You never know when you might want some additional privacy, though I’d definitely not confuse this for strong privacy measures like encryption, amongst your files. Perhaps you’re planning on releasing a memo and you don’t want anyone to read it until you’re done?

I dunno? It’s up to you as to why you’d want the potential privacy from making it so that the files in a directory can’t be listed. Your reasons are your own. I just share tidbits of knowledge.

We will be using ‘chmod’ in this exercise. The man page for ‘chmod’ describes itself like:

chmod – change file mode bits

But, for our purposes and generally speaking, it’s used to adjust the file permissions. As you should know, files have various permissions in Linux – and everything in Linux is a file. There are read, write, and executable bits that can be set (with said chmod, for example) and there’s also file ownership (for another day). We’ll be using those permissions to prevent listing the files in a directory.

Ready? It really won’t take long – and it should be easy enough for anyone…

Disallow Directory Listing:

As the title suggests, this is another ‘in the terminal’ application. So, of course, you’ll need an open terminal. You should open a terminal now. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With your terminal now open, let’s first start by making a directory – just so that we can then use that to disallow directory listing. We’ll just do this in your /home directory. Start with:

mkdir sample

1	mkdir sample

Now, let’s move to the new ‘sample’ directory and make a couple of files.

cd sample
touch foo.txt bar.txt

1 2	cd sample touch foo.txt bar.txt

Now, what we’re going to do is change the permissions of the ‘sample’ directory, like so:

chmod 0111 ~/sample

1	chmod 0111 ~/sample

You don’t need ‘sudo’ or anything, because these files belong to you. But, you can now test it. While still in the folder, try any of the following:

ls

Or (from outside the directory, if you’d like):

ls ~/sample

1	ls ~/sample

In all cases, it should give you a ‘permission denied’ error, because you no longer have permission to list files from within that directory.

If you wish to reverse this, you can simply try changing the permissions again. You can just:

chmod 0666 ~/sample

1	chmod 0666 ~/sample

With that command, you can resume directory listing. So, it’s pretty easy to reverse the process. It’s also not the greatest security measure you can take, because of that. So, do what you will with it, as you now know how to disallow directory listing in the terminal.

Closure:

There you have it, it’s yet another article. This one seemed like an interesting one to write, so I figured I’d write it. You never know when you want to disallow directory listing, but now you know how to do so. If you have any questions, feel free to ask…

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How To: Find Files Over A Certain Size

Today’s article is going to be a quick article, one where we learn how to find files over a certain size. We’ll be using the ‘find’ command, which we’ve used previously, even though it can be fairly complicated to use. If you want to play around with the ‘find’ command, read on!

Also, and this wasn’t the first article I wrote tonight. I wrote another article. It was a good article. No, it was a great article! Then, as I’m wrapping that article up and hit the preview button, I scrolled down and saw the automatic article recommendation thing at the bottom…

Yup… It was such a good article, I wrote it twice! Well, I couldn’t let that pass – as I’d just done so recently, so I’m writing a new one and this one should be entirely new!

Making the find command approachable to new users means doing it in small bits. Fortunately, the command tells you what it does by its very name. It does exactly what you’d expect – it helps you find files. In fact, it defines itself as:

find – search for files in a directory hierarchy

So, it does what you’d expect it to do – though it can seem fairly complicated to a new user. Let’s do our best to make it approachable, shall we?

Lets Find Files Over A Certain Size:

If you’re a regular reader, you’ll know what’s coming next…

So, if you just want to run this ‘find’ command in the directory (and recursive into sub-directories) you’re in, it’s nice and easy. Try this:

find -size +100M

1	find -size +100M

As you can guess, that finds files bigger than 100 MB in your current directory (and recursively). If you want to find files of a different size, you just change 100M to whatever you need – like 1000M (you can use G for gigabytes, for example).

If you want, you can specify a directory. Let’s say you want to do the entire system from the root directory (not to be confused with the root user). You just specify that – but you’ll want to use ‘sudo’ because you don’t have permission to read all those files.

sudo find / -size +100M

1	sudo find / -size +100M

Like this, you can specify the starting directory. If you want to find all files larger than 2 GB in your home directory (and sub-directories) then you just run this command:

find ~ / -size +2G

1	find ~ / -size +2G

There’s so much that you can do with the ‘find’ command. It’s really quite useful and I find myself using it with some regularity. Don’t forget to run the man find command to learn more about it. You can do a lot more than just find files over a certain size.

Closure:

So, I’ve tried to make the find command approachable by even novice users. It can be a bit complex looking, but it really is useful. If you think I’ve made it approachable, go ahead and comment. Of course, comment if you think the opposite is true. It’s all good, we’ve just tried to learn how to find files over a certain size.

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Meta: The State Of Linux Tips #14

I try to do this every month, and this month’s no different, it’s time for a meta article about the state of Linux Tips. This is only the the 14th installation, so I’m obviously not very good at doing this every month. Still, they’re easy enough articles to write and it’s a good night to write one.

So, if you’re interested in what’s going on here at the site, read on! If not, there will be a more informative article in just two days. Well, assuming I keep up the current publication schedule.

Speaking of which, this is the 324th article to be posted at Linux Tips. I’ve had a few helpful articles along the way, but have managed to keep the publication schedule up for this entire time.

I didn’t expect to make it this long. Indeed, it was pretty amazing when I did it for just a year. Here we are, finishing up the second year. Ho hum…

Some Numbers:

Traffic still expanded in December, but the growth was slower than it had been lately. We can be reasonably sure that this has to do with the holidays. Still, it was nice to see the growth. For example, for December:

There were more than 11,600 unique visitors.
They visited more than 18,700 times.
We consumed about 18.5 GB of bandwidth.
Russia was the 2nd most user of my traffic.
96% of my traffic used Linux.
86% of my traffic used a browser that identified as Chrome.
Linux.org provided about 2% of what Google Search provided for visit.
Linux.org provided the most repeat visitors.

As you can see, there’s not much that has changed.

This month, January 2023, looks to be similar with regards to unique visitors – but might actually have slightly fewer people in the ‘visits’ column. Again, it’s likely due to the holidays. Quite a bit of my traffic comes from work-hours in the US. So, the holiday slowdown certainly would explain that.

I’m going to skip the next section and just bring this to a close. The reason I’m skipping the next session is that it literally hasn’t changed. The most popular pages are still the most popular pages.

Also, we’ve captured the number 1 slot at Google for ‘ask a good support question’, which is nice. That doesn’t attract a lot of clicks, but there are some. It’s a nice page to have ranking that well.

Meta Article Closure:

I see no reason to drag this article out. Exactly the same articles are as popular as they were the month before this. You can click back through the Meta Articles if you want. I’ve never had a site this popular, so I’m not sure if that’s normal. It seems to me that it’d be fairly normal.

Until next month…

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