Free disk space, and destroy files you mean to destroy. Caches, thumbnails, package leftovers, trash — and a shredder for the files you want gone rather than merely deleted.
syn-clean list # the category names
syn-clean scan # what there is, and how big
syn-clean scan cache trash # just those
syn-clean clean --all # every category that does not need root
syn-clean clean --dry-run cache
syn-clean gui # the window--dry-run says what would go and removes nothing. --yes skips the
confirmation. Nothing is removed without one of the two.
syn-clean shred ~/Documents/old.pdf
syn-clean shred --passes 7 ~/secret/Overwriting a file only destroys the old bytes if they are rewritten in place, and a copy-on-write filesystem does not do that — it writes elsewhere and leaves the original blocks until something reuses them. Snapshots keep whole copies, and an SSD controller remaps blocks out of any program's reach.
syn-clean says which of these apply to the path you gave it before it starts, rather than reporting success and letting the name imply something it cannot deliver. Full-disk encryption is the thing that actually makes a deleted file unreadable.
--rec prints one record per line for a front end. pacman is used to count
orphaned packages when it is present; with synfiles installed, "Destroy
Permanently" appears in the file manager's right-click menu.
git clone https://github.com/velle999/syn-clean
cd syn-clean && makepkg -simakepkg fetches the source for this PKGBUILD's exact version from this
repository's releases, so a clone can only ever build the source it was
written against. .SRCINFO lists what it needs.
Developed in the SynapseOS monorepo,
in syn-clean/. This repository is generated from it — the PKGBUILD, a
generated .SRCINFO and this README — so issues and patches belong there.
syn-clean 0.1.0-4 · GPL-2.0-or-later