safesweep

Clean caches and temp files that are provably safe to delete, and see what is eating your CPU.

Most cleaners guess. safesweep only touches known cache locations, and before deleting anything it proves no running process is using it. On WSL, it also tells you how to give the freed space back to Windows.

Linux and WSL only.

Install

cargo install safesweep

Or download a prebuilt static Linux binary (x86_64 or aarch64) from the releases page (each tarball has a .sha256 file next to it).

Usage

safesweep                     # list candidates and why each is or isn't safe (same as `safesweep scan`)
safesweep scan --json         # same, as JSON
safesweep clean               # dry run: what would be removed
safesweep clean --apply       # remove it
safesweep --category pip clean --apply   # limit to one rule (repeatable)
safesweep why                 # what is using the CPU right now

why: what is eating the CPU

safesweep why samples /proc for one second (--interval-ms, at least 100) and prints how busy the machine is, CPU per program (summed across its processes, so twelve rustc jobs show as one line), and the busiest processes with their command lines. Percentages are per core, like top.

On WSL, only Linux processes are visible. If Task Manager shows vmmem busy but why is quiet, the load is on the Windows side.

Every removal is logged to ~/.local/state/safesweep/<unix-time>.log. If that log cannot be written, nothing is deleted.

Exit codes: 0 success, 1 some removals failed, 2 bad usage.

What makes a candidate safe

A candidate is skipped, with the reason shown, if any of these hold:

• it is a symlink, or resolves outside its rule's directory
• anything inside is owned by another user (unless run as root)
• anything inside changed within the rule's age threshold (newer of mtime and ctime, so a tree unpacked with tar or cp -p today counts as new)
• it contains a socket or FIFO (live tmux or X11 sockets don't show up as open files)
• anything inside is open, memory-mapped, executing, or the working directory of any process
• it contains a .git directory (an editable install or git dependency can hold uncommitted work)
• any part of it can't be read, it contains a read-only directory (deletion would stop halfway), or it is or contains a mount point
• /proc can't be read, so open files can't be checked
• it is in the temp dir and safesweep runs as root (services with a private /tmp and containers can't be checked from outside)

TMPDIR must be an absolute path that is not / and does not contain your home directory; otherwise safesweep refuses to run.

These checks run when scanning and again right before each deletion.

Reported sizes count only files with a single hard link. uv hardlinks its cache into virtualenvs, so deleting those files would free nothing, and safesweep doesn't pretend it would.

Rules

pycache and artifacts walk your home directory (skipping dot-directories), so they only run when named.

artifacts only lists a build directory when its project has a marker file next to it (package.json for node_modules, Cargo.toml for target, pyproject.toml, requirements.txt or setup.py for .venv) and its git history is idle: nothing touched .git/logs/HEAD or .git/index for 30 days. Git activity includes other branches and linked worktrees. The build directory must also contain a file only the tool creates (pyvenv.cfg, CACHEDIR.TAG, .package-lock.json, ...), so a hand-made folder named target is never touched. The project directory must be unused by any process, not just the build directory, so a long-running service keeps its dependencies. Projects without .git and monorepo members without their own .git are never listed. Every normal safety check still applies, so a build directory used in the last 30 days is skipped even if nothing was committed.

WSL

Deleting files inside WSL doesn't shrink the ext4.vhdx disk image on Windows. After clean --apply frees space on WSL, safesweep prints the steps to compact it: export a backup, wsl --shutdown, then Optimize-VHD or diskpart. It never runs them for you.

It does not recommend wsl --manage --set-sparse. WSL disabled sparse VHDs over data-corruption reports, and a sparse disk can't be compacted with Optimize-VHD.

License

Licensed under either of Apache License 2.0 or MIT license, at your option.