what is the "~/.local" and can I delete it?

Question

/home/user/.local is kinda big (~5.6Gb on debian squeeze and 3.7 on ubuntu 12.04) for me, so, can I delete it?

score 35 · Accepted Answer · edited Oct 19 '23 at 07:55

35

~/.local – or more precisely, ~/.local/share – is where XDG-compliant programs store user data (e.g., fonts, mail messages) according to the XDG Base Directory specification.

The ~/.local folder also contains share/Trash, which is your trash bin. Everything you put in there of course takes up space. I assume this is the most likely cause of disk usage.

Check how much space it takes up with:

du -hs ~/.local/share/Trash

If you don't need to keep items in the trash, empty it through your file manager or just delete everything in share/Trash with:

rm -rf ~/.local/share/Trash

edited Oct 19 '23 at 07:55

ghostly_s

200

answered Sep 13 '12 at 12:13

slhck

228,104

1

can we configure custom make/installs to use it instead of /usr/local? – Chris Apr 10 '16 at 21:41
Refer to Ignacio's answer if you are looking to delete the whole .local directory and not just Trash sub-directory – Silidrone Dec 23 '20 at 15:04

score 8 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 13 '12 at 12:13

8

It's the new location for user-specific, application-specific data. Removing it will not affect the system as a whole, but it will erase a large amount of user data.

answered Sep 13 '12 at 12:13

Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams

112,653

1

pip installs applications there , not just app specific data. – RichieHH Mar 05 '21 at 06:30

what is the "~/.local" and can I delete it?

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