Automated files cleanup on Linux

🧹 My Messy Linux Box As year passes, my Linux system, over the time, starts to get a little… Messy. My ~/Downloads directory is a digital dumping ground. It’s a collection of ISOs, test scripts, and those huge multi-gigabyte Virtual Machine images I need to test once and then forget about. Add to that ~/Pictures/Screenshots, which is overflowing with thousands of quick snaps I’ll never look at again. Disk space is cheap nowadays, but I like to have things nice and clean. I could go in and manually clean it… But who remembers to do that ? ...

October 23, 2025 · Andrea Manzini

Systemd Socket Activation Explained

💭 What ? Imagine a web server that only starts when someone actually tries to access it. Or a database that spins up only when a query comes in: this is the magic of socket activation. The concept is not new, as old-school sysadmins may are used to see something like inetd or xinetd for on-demand service activation in the past. As some cool projects like cockpit have already started using this little-known feature, in this blog post we’ll see the basics and try to get familiarity with the tooling. ...

February 2, 2025 · Andrea Manzini

compare package version across distros

TLDR: This script now answers the question “Do some of my openSUSE packages have newer versions in other distros?” As a following on previous post, I added an useful feature in order to have more information about a package. Since I maintain some openSUSE packages, I want to be informed if they gets outdated and if other packagers have released newer versions. ...

January 9, 2023 · Andrea Manzini

get update info about packages

being lazy, I made a small utility to check last pkgs update date on Open Build Service. You can find the project repository on my github, but it’s so simple I can paste also here. The usage is pretty simple: just run the command giving it a package name, and then it will tell you when it was last updated. With this information, you can decide/check if the package needs some work on! ...

November 24, 2022 · Andrea Manzini