3.3 Invoking guix-gc

Packages that are installed but not used may be garbage-collected. The guix-gc command allows users to explicitly run the garbage collector to reclaim space from the /nix/store directory.

The garbage collector has a set of known roots: any file under /nix/store reachable from a root is considered live and cannot be deleted; any other file is considered dead and may be deleted. The set of garbage collector roots includes default user profiles, and may be augmented with guix-build --root, for example (see Invoking guix-build).

The guix-gc command has three modes of operation: it can be used to garbage-collect any dead files (the default), to delete specific files (the --delete option), or to print garbage-collector information. The available options are listed below:

--collect-garbage[=min]

-C [min]

Collect garbage—i.e., unreachable /nix/store files and sub-directories. This is the default operation when no option is specified.

When min is given, stop once min bytes have been collected. min may be a number of bytes, or it may include a unit as a suffix, such as MiB for mebibytes and GB for gigabytes.

When min is omitted, collect all the garbage.

--delete

-d

Attempt to delete all the store files and directories specified as arguments. This fails if some of the files are not in the store, or if they are still live.

--list-dead

Show the list of dead files and directories still present in the store—i.e., files and directories no longer reachable from any root.

--list-live

Show the list of live store files and directories.