cargo-clean-all

Why does it exist

I was a bit shocked when I realized that my rust target directories took up a total of over 50gb, so I developed this tool to help me clean up all the project target dirs. There is already cargo-clean-recursive which unfortunately doesn't support interactive selections or keeping recent files in order to not slow down the projects I'm currently working on.

What does it do

This is a custom cargo subcomand that searches all rust cargo projects in a given parent directory and deletes the build artifacts (aka target directories). Before cleanup it shows the amount of disk space that can be freed up. Specific projects can be excluded from cleaning using an interactive selection, and/or CLI filters. The CLI filters can exclude projects that have been compiled in the last X days, have a target directory that is smaller than X, or are specifically ignored.

The actual cleaning consists of simply deleting the target directories from the detected projects, which seems to be what cargo clean does by default

Installation

Install using cargo:

cargo install cargo-clean-all

Usage

Clean all projects in the current working directory with the possibility to interactively deselect projects

cargo clean-all -i

Clean all projects in the home directory (and subdirectories) that haven't been compiled in the last 7 days without interactive mode. This will still show the projects and ask for confirmation, but won't show the manual selection dialog

cargo clean-all --keep-days 7 ~

Clean all projects in the home directory (and subdirectories) that take up more than 10MB with interactive mode.

cargo clean-all -i --keep-size 10MB ~

Clean all projects in the home directory (and subdirectories), excluding the Download and Documents directories. Since interactive mode is used, the projects in the ignored directories may still be manually added to the cleanup run.

cargo clean-all -i --ignore ~/Downloads --ignore ~/Documents ~

Alternatives

cargo-clean-recursive

Feature	cargo-clean-all	cargo-clean-recursive
Clean projects under current dir	yes	yes
Clean projects under any dir	yes	no
Display freed up / freeable disk space	yes	no
Keep target dirs below a size threshold	yes	no
Keep target dirs with a last modified treshold	yes	no
Ask before cleaning	yes	no
Interactive selection of projects	yes	no
Clean only release, debug or docs	no (not yet)	yes
Real cargo clean command under the hood	no	yes
Keep executables in an extra directory	yes	no

Note that cargo-clean-recursive uses the actual cargo clean command under the hood instead of simply deleting the target directories. This makes the cleaning work exactly as intended by the installed version of cargo, which can certainly be desirable in some cases.

---

Manual

Recursively clean all cargo projects in a given directory that match the specified criteria

Usage: cargo clean-all [OPTIONS] [DIR]

Arguments:
  [DIR]  The directory in which the projects will be searched [default: .]

Options:
  -y, --yes                Don't ask for confirmation; Just clean all detected projects that are not excluded by other constraints
  -s, --keep-size <SIZE>   Ignore projects with a target dir size smaller than the specified value. The size can be specified using binary prefixes like "10MB" for 10_000_000 bytes, or "1KiB" for 1_024 bytes [default: 0]
  -d, --keep-days <DAYS>   Ignore projects that have been compiled in the last [DAYS] days. The last compilation time is infered by the last modified time of the contents of target directory [default: 0]
      --dry-run            Just collect the cleanable projects and list the freeable space, but don't delete anything
  -t, --threads <THREADS>  The number of threads to use for directory scanning. 0 automatically selects the number of threads [default: 0]
  -v, --verbose            Show access errors that occur while scanning. By default those errors are hidden
  -i, --interactive        Use the interactive project selection. This will show a selection of all cleanable projects with the possibility to manually select or deselect
      --ignore <IGNORE>    Directories that should be ignored by default, including subdirectories. This will still detect the projects in those directories, but mark them to not be cleaned. To actually skip scanning directories, use --skip instead. The directories can be specified as absolute paths or relative to the workdir
  -e, --keep-executable    Keeping compiled executables in release, debug and cross-compilation directories. Moves the executable to a new folder outside of target
      --skip <SKIP>        Directories that should be fully skipped during scanning, including subdirectories. This will speed up the scanning time by not doing any reads for the specified directories. The directories can be specified as absolute paths or relative to the workdir
  -h, --help               Print help information
  -V, --version            Print version information