During the last days I recognized that the available storage room on the root-partition of my opensuse 11.1 system was melting away ...
Looking closer at my "temp"-folders in /tmp and var/temp I found that especially the kdecache-[user]/kpc folders had been "blown-up" by data from plasma themes I had been testing weeks ago (each about 150 MB of data residing in files of the type "plasma-theme-XXX.data" (about 120 MB) and "*.index" (about 32 MB)).
In my root account (which I barely use (except for update reasons) this amounts to a data overflow of 450 MB, in my main account the whole folder covers 3,3 GB!
Looks a lot like most of these are "leftovers" from "theme-tests", about weeks ago.
So here are my questions:

1. May I delete the files that are actually not in "use"??
2. Is there an option to avoid such "data-crowding" (since this data is completely obsolete after being tested) by automatically deletion??
3. Shouldn't this be a standard option in the theme manager of plasma?

Thanks for your answers!

Jay

It is completely safe to delete these folders. They are not used for storing any data, although I wouldn't delete them with KDE running....

Unfortunately there is no way to prevent this from happening in the future, except manually clearing it.

There is no need to delete these files, because in reality they are not so giant. In this example from the ubuntuusers-forum the files have a real size of only 8,6MB:

Code: Select all

genericuser@pc:/var/tmp/kdecache-genericuser/kpc$ ls -lhs
insgesamt 8,6M
 68K -rw-rw---- 1 stephan stephan 121M 2008-12-11 12:02 amarok.data
8,0K -rw-rw---- 1 stephan stephan  33M 2008-12-11 13:41 amarok.index
804K -rw-rw---- 1 stephan stephan 5,0M 2008-12-11 12:42 Amarok-pixmaps.data
 76K -rw-rw---- 1 stephan stephan 1,3M 2008-12-11 13:41 Amarok-pixmaps.index
5,1M -rw-r--r-- 1 stephan stephan  16M 2009-03-24 20:46 kde-icon-cache.data
160K -rw-r--r-- 1 stephan stephan 4,1M 2009-03-24 21:52 kde-icon-cache.index
   0 -rw-r--r-- 1 stephan stephan    0 2009-03-24 21:52 kde-icon-cache.updated
4,0K -rw-r--r-- 1 stephan stephan 121M 2009-02-18 11:23 plasma_theme_Arezzo.data
4,0K -rw-r--r-- 1 stephan stephan  33M 2009-02-18 11:23 plasma_theme_Arezzo.index
2,1M -rw-r--r-- 1 stephan stephan 121M 2009-03-24 21:22 plasma_theme_default.data
296K -rw-r--r-- 1 stephan stephan  33M 2009-03-24 21:22 plasma_theme_default.index
4,0K -rw-r--r-- 1 stephan stephan 121M 2009-02-18 11:23 plasma_theme_openSUSE.data
4,0K -rw-r--r-- 1 stephan stephan  33M 2009-02-18 11:23 plasma_theme_openSUSE.index
4,0K -rw-r--r-- 1 stephan stephan 121M 2009-02-18 11:22 plasma_theme_spoons.data
4,0K -rw-r--r-- 1 stephan stephan  33M 2009-02-18 11:22 plasma_theme_spoons.index

http://forum.ubuntuusers.de/topic/der-kde-4-sammelthread/312/

These files are "Sparse-files", here is a describtion how do they work:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse_file