cargo-clean-all

Why does it exist

I was a bit shocked when I realized that my rust target directories took up a total of over 50gb, so I developed this tool to help me clean up all the project target dirs. There is already cargo-clean-recursive which unfortunately doesn't support keeping recent files in order to not slow down the projects I'm currently working on.

What does it do

This is a custom cargo comand that analyses all cargo target directories under a given parent directory and allows for cleaning them, following certain criteria. The cleaning-criteria include keep target dirs last modified X days ago and keep target dirs with size less than X. Before actually doing anything, the detected projects are listed with their individual and total target dir sizes. The actual cleaning must be confirmed unless --yes is specified.

The actual cleaning consists of simply deleting the target directories from the detected projects, which seems to be what cargo clean does by default

Installation

Install using cargo:

cargo install cargo-clean-all

Usage

Clean all target directories under the current working directory.

cargo clean-all

Clean all target directories under the directory [dir].

cargo clean-all [dir]

Keep target directories that have a size of less than [filesize].

cargo clean-all --keep-size [filesize]

Keep target directories younger than [days] days.

cargo clean-all --keep-days [days]

Specify the number of threads to use for the recursive scan .

cargo clean-all --threads [number of threads]

Alternatives

cargo-clean-recursive

Feature	`cargo-clean-all`	`cargo-clean-recursive`
Clean projects under current dir	yes	yes
Clean projects under any dir	yes	no
Display freed up / freeable disk space	yes	no
Keep target dirs below a size threshold	yes	no
Keep target dirs with a last modified treshold	yes	no
Ask before cleaning	yes	no
Clean only `release`, `debug` or `docs`	no (not yet)	yes
Real `cargo clean` command under the hood	no	yes

Note that cargo-clean-recursive uses the actual cargo clean command under the hood instead of simply deleting the target directories. This gives makes the cleaning work exactly as intended by the installed version of cargo, which can certainly be desirable in some cases.