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 Â· 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 Â· 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 Since I maintain some openSUSE packages, I want to be informed if they gets outdated and if other packagers have released newer versions.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 Â· 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 Â· Andrea Manzini