Clean up package manager cache on nixos with full root partition

Question

On Ubuntu when the root partition gets full you can always run apt-get autoremove, apt-get clean and apt-get autoclean to free up some space for the package manager to continue working. But the equivalent command on nixos seems to have some issues running on a full root partition:

$ nix-collect-garbage
...
error: committing transaction: database or disk is full

Quite the pickle to be in when the reason you're running nix-collect-garbage to begin with is to clean up the full disk.

Rovanion · Accepted Answer · 2018-01-01T17:24:19.647

1

Hopefully you'll have stuff stored in /tmp you can remove to free up the space needed for nix-collect-garbage to complete.

$ rm -r /tmp/*

edited Jan 01 '18 at 17:24

answered Dec 19 '17 at 22:18

Rovanion

959

Do you intend to remove the /tmp directory itself? Otherwise, I'd suggest something like rm -r /tmp/*. – Jeff Schaller Jan 01 '18 at 14:05
Usually, /tmp is mounted into RAM so it won't help in those cases – piegames May 15 '20 at 20:28

Clean up package manager cache on nixos with full root partition

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