9

I am running Mathematica 10 on linux and noted that the directories containing Mathematica's documentation come to over 3GB.

Am I safe to delete these directories without affecting how Mathematica runs? Presumably doing so means I cannot pull up the documentation from Mathematica, but given that when it's in use I am normally online this is a small price to pay.

I have previously read this thread, but there they only mention altering the documentation notebooks to reduce their size: this solution then requires some work, compared to just deleting them all!

Thanks.

Community
  • 1
owen88
  • 355
  • 1
  • 9
  • 2
    Probably it's ok. A nice extension of this question might be how to change the Help > Find Selected Function menu command to search the online documentation. – Michael E2 Apr 30 '15 at 12:18
  • 4
    Well, I think nobody is going to tell you that it's fine for sure, as Mathematica hasn't had the documentation as an optional component for a long time (since version 4 IIRC? So about 15 years now.) Personally, I'd just remove it and see what happens. You'll soon know whether things work correctly (for whatever definition of "correctly" you prefer) or not. – Oleksandr R. Apr 30 '15 at 13:12
  • I miss a option to install Mathematica with no docs. – Murta Apr 30 '15 at 15:46
  • 4
    In theory deleting the documentation notebooks should not affect any functionality (it certainly doesn't affect the kernel) aside from the in-product documentation, obviously. However, this is clearly not a supported operation, so there could be some instability in the FrontEnd as a result, but I'd say it's rather unlikely to crash due to this (no guarantees, though). – Stefan R May 01 '15 at 17:31
  • possible duplicate of Which Mathematica files may be deleted to save space – Michael E2 Aug 05 '15 at 13:48
  • I cannot vote to close this question as a duplicate because it concerns V10, which is organized quite differently than the versions discussed in the question that this one allegedly duplicates. The answers there can not be trusted for V10. – m_goldberg Aug 05 '15 at 20:16

1 Answers1

7

With some confidence instilled by the comments, I decided to give it a go.

The subdirectory of Documentation which appears to take up the most space is Symbols (2GB). Having deleted this I can happily say there has been (in the last hour) no adverse effect.

Following Oleksandr R.'s lead, I'm not promising the same will be true for anyone else: but it seems to have worked fine for me.

owen88
  • 355
  • 1
  • 9
  • I would expect that the only thing that's going to happen is that some of the links in the remaining documentation will be broken. I would be real surprised if anything else happened. – 2012rcampion Apr 30 '15 at 16:16