How to remove all old and outdated brew packages on MacOS
I
am using Homebrew to install packages on MacOS Sierra or Mac OS X. I noticed multiple version of bash or curl installed in /usr/local/Cellar/bash/. How can I delete an outdated version of brew packages and only keep the latest version on my system?
First, open the Terminal application. To see if multiple version of curl packages installed, enter:
$ ls /usr/local/Cellar/curl/
OR
$ brew info curl
Sample outputs:
curl: stable 7.51.0 (bottled) [keg-only]
Get a file from an HTTP, HTTPS or FTP server
https://curl.haxx.se/
/usr/local/Cellar/curl/7.50.3 (367 files, 2.6M)
Built from source on 2016-11-02 at 03:13:19 with: –with-nghttp2
/usr/local/Cellar/curl/7.51.0 (368 files, 2.7M)
Built from source on 2016-11-08 at 01:10:09 with: –with-nghttp2
From: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/master/Formula/curl.rb
==> Dependencies
Build: pkg-config ?
Optional: openssl ?, libidn ?, rtmpdump ?, libssh2 ?, c-ares ?, libmetalink ?, libressl ?, nghttp2 ?
==> Options
–with-c-ares
Build with C-Ares async DNS support
–with-gssapi
Build with GSSAPI/Kerberos authentication support.
–with-libidn
Build with support for Internationalized Domain Names
–with-libmetalink
Build with libmetalink support.
–with-libressl
Build with LibreSSL instead of Secure Transport or OpenSSL
–with-libssh2
Build with scp and sftp support
–with-nghttp2
Build with HTTP/2 support (requires OpenSSL or LibreSSL)
–with-openssl
Build with OpenSSL instead of Secure Transport
–with-rtmpdump
Build with RTMP support
==> Caveats
This formula is keg-only, which means it was not symlinked into /usr/local.
macOS already provides this software and installing another version in
parallel can cause all kinds of trouble.
Generally there are no consequences of this for you. If you build your
own software and it requires this formula, you ll need to add to your
build variables:
LDFLAGS: -L/usr/local/opt/curl/lib
CPPFLAGS: -I/usr/local/opt/curl/include
PKG_CONFIG_PATH: /usr/local/opt/curl/lib/pkgconfig
Say hello to the cleanup option
The cleanup option can remove all installed or specific formulae, remove any older versions from the cellar. Also, old downloads from the Homebrew download-cache are deleted. Simply type the following command to free up disk space and delete outdated older versions:
$ brew cleanup
Sample outputs:
Fig.01: Delete outdated version of package using brew
It is recommended that you run cleanup after update to get rid of old packages:
$ brew update && brew upgrade && brew cleanup
At the end you will see the following message on screen:
Removing: /usr/local/Cellar/android-sdk/24.2… (1,460 files, 105.3M)
Removing: /usr/local/Cellar/android-sdk/24.4… (1,471 files, 136.4M)
Removing: /usr/local/Cellar/atk/2.20.0… (205 files, 3.1M)
Removing: /usr/local/Cellar/babl/0.1.16… (37 files, 819.1K)
Removing: /usr/local/Cellar/bash/4.3.42… (59 files, 7.3M)
Removing: /usr/local/Cellar/bash/4.3.46… (59 files, 7.3M)
Removing: /usr/local/Cellar/bash/4.4… (145 files, 8.8M)
…
..
…
Removing: /Users/veryv/Library/Logs/Homebrew/libtorrent… (1.9K)
Removing: /Users/veryv/Library/Logs/Homebrew/most… (5 files, 124.5K)
Removing: /Users/veryv/Library/Logs/Homebrew/mtr… (68B)
Removing: /Users/veryv/Library/Logs/Homebrew/nmap… (6 files, 1.6M)
Removing: /Users/veryv/Library/Logs/Homebrew/openssl… (68B)
Removing: /Users/veryv/Library/Logs/Homebrew/rsnapshot… (3 files, 10.2K)
Removing: /Users/veryv/Library/Logs/Homebrew/ssh-copy-id… (68B)
Removing: /Users/veryv/Library/Logs/Homebrew/wakeonlan… (2 files, 470B)
==> This operation has freed approximately 3.9G of disk space.
A note about cask
Type the following to cleanup cask too:
$ brew cask cleanup
Sample outputs:
==> Removing cached downloads
/Users/veryv/Library/Caches/Homebrew/Cask/gimp–2.8.18-x86_64.dmg
/Users/veryv/Library/Caches/Homebrew/Cask/lisanet-gimp–2.8.14p2.dmg
/Users/veryv/Library/Caches/Homebrew/Cask/wireshark–2.2.3.dmg
/Users/veryv/Library/Caches/Homebrew/Cask/wkhtmltopdf–0.12.4.pkg
==> This operation has freed approximately 199.8M of disk space.
