Deleting leftover hidden files

The hidden files are in place to keep user program setup and other program information.

I strongly suggest you to not delete those files.

If you a sure to want to delete them, then open the menu
Places->Home Folder (press CTRL+H if you don't see hidden files)
and then select and press the Delete keyboard key.
If you don't want move them into trash press Shift+Delete keyboard keys

From terminal you can delete hidden files ( don't do it ) with:
rm -fr /home/youruser/.*

HTH

The hidden files are in place to keep user program setup and other program information.

  This is understand, available if I reinstall the programs.

I strongly suggest you to not delete those files.

  I have no intention of reinstalling these in the foreseeable future.
  I see you show me how though.
  Would doing so "harm" Ubuntu in any way?

  After all, reinstalling the programs, say in a year or two, would recreate these files anyway wouldn't they?

Bruce Milmine

If you do not plan on using the programs in the foreseeable future, then by all means delete the folders. You will just lose all your settings for that program (which you have uninstalled and do not plan on using again anyway). No, it will not harm Ubuntu.

Collin

  Thanks

  to continue, from the original question:

  Is there a program that will do this automatically?
  A terminal command to delete these hidden leftover folder/files?

  Or am I going into dangerous waters here?

Bruce Milmine

You can try, when uninstalling programs, if using apt-get, you can try to use the 'purge' option, that is:

i.e. : sudo apt-get --purge remove whois
Reading Package list... Done
Creating dependencies tree
Reading state information... Done
Next packages will be REMOVED:
  whois*
0 updated, 0 will be installed, 1 for removing and 0 not updated.

The you will notice that the package has an asterisk '*' next to it's name. That means that is going to be 'purged', and so, all it's configuration files are going to be removed.

If you wanna find lost configuration files, you should install 'deborphan' package. It will help you to find lost config files and programs installed for a dependency that now aren't needed.

Installing and unistalling the application 'lm-sensors', and later, running 'deborphan', I can find all the data left behind, see...

$ sudo deborphan
libsensors3

I can see there that I have a dependency that is not used now... So I can remove it with:

$ sudo apt-get --purge remove libsensors3

and with the '--find-config' option, you could see if there's any configuration file left...

$ sudo deborphan --find-config
lm-sensors

And now remove the config file with dpgk and the purge option:

$ sudo dpkg --purge lm-sensors

And you are ready! :D

That files begining by a dot in your home directory are your user preferences for the applications. If you can recognize in the name of the file an app you uninstalled, that you aren't going to use again, you can remove them.

Good stuff. Gracias Alvaro
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