BleachBit

BleachBit deletes files that pile up on a system without being wanted: browser caches, cookies, browsing history, thumbnails, package manager caches, log files, temporary directories and application leftovers. What is removed for each program is described in separate definition files, so covering another application means adding a definition rather than writing code.

Applications appear in a checklist whose options can be ticked individually, and a preview run reports which paths would be removed and how much space that would recover before anything is touched. It also vacuums SQLite databases used by programs such as Firefox, compacting them after rows have been deleted.

A second group of functions overwrites data instead of merely unlinking it: shredding files or folders, wiping a filesystem’s free space, and emptying the wastebasket with overwriting. On solid-state drives and on copy-on-write or journalling filesystems, overwriting does not reliably reach the original blocks, so these functions should not be relied on there. It runs as a window or from the command line.