Question

49

Remove documentation to save hard drive space

rated 0 times [ 49] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 42485 / 3 Years ago, wed, august 4, 2021, 1:38:21

I like to create a rather small Ubuntu installation in a Virtual Box machine. It should basically just provide TeX Live and related tools. I figured now that I have almost 1GB of data under /usr/share/doc. I don't need this documentation in this case, just the LaTeX related man pages, which are not located there.

Is there a way to uninstall all these documentation files using apt-get?

Alternatively, is it reasonably save to just delete the content of /usr/share/doc?

I like to share the Virtual Box machine with others, which shouldn't run in trouble.

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ormlai

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2 Years ago

answered 3 Years ago quivedge · Accepted Answer

According to the Ubuntu wiki, you can instruct dpkg not to install any documentation. This should prevent any documentation (except copyright info) from being installed by apt.

Create a file /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/01_nodoc which specifies the
desired filters. Example:

path-exclude /usr/share/doc/*

# we need to keep copyright files for legal reasons

path-include /usr/share/doc/*/copyright

# if you also want to remove the man pages uncomment the next line

#path-exclude /usr/share/man/*

path-exclude /usr/share/groff/*

path-exclude /usr/share/info/*

# lintian stuff is small, but really unnecessary

path-exclude /usr/share/lintian/*

path-exclude /usr/share/linda/*

Then you can manually remove any documentation already installed:

find /usr/share/doc -depth -type f ! -name copyright|xargs rm || true

find /usr/share/doc -empty|xargs rmdir || true

rm -rf /usr/share/groff/* /usr/share/info/*

rm -rf /usr/share/lintian/* /usr/share/linda/* /var/cache/man/*

If you also want to remove the man pages do:

rm -rf /usr/share/man/*

The example is written for OEMs, but it worked just as well for me. Took my /usr/share/doc/ directory down from ~150MB to ~20MB.