Difference between yay --cleanafter and yaycache -r --remove-build-files

[KAGEYAM4]

Sorry about frequently asking questions.

So yay downloads build-files which can be either:

• prebuild binary in the form of tar.gz
• git repo
• If it is tar.gz it generates pkg.tar.zst which is unpacked and installed.
• If it is git repo, it is compiled, and pkg.tar.zst is generated which is unpacked and installed.

So anything except pkg.tar.zst is build files.

yaycache -r --remove-build-files - will remove all files except pkg.tar.zst ( will consides --keep )
yay --cleanafter - what does this do?

[aokellermann]

No worries. I just now enabled discussions for this repo so future questions can go here instead: https://github.com/aokellermann/yaycache/discussions

AUR packages are just git repos that usually just contain a PKGBUILD and maybe a couple other files. All other files such as the source code's repo and pkg.tar.zst are "untracked" in git terms.

--remove-build-files: Removes all untracked files except pkg.tar.zst files. It also takes into account arguments like min-mtime/min-atime and --ignore.

--cleanafter: According to https://linuxcommandlibrary.com/man/yay it removes all untracked files except directories (no idea why).