silly cargo, stop using all my disk space!

_posts/2020-08-04-target-rich-environment.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "Reclaiming disk space from cargo's target/ directories"
+tags:
+- rust
+---
+
+
+You never really appreciate disk space until it's all gone. This morning I
+noticed that my laptop had come perilously close to exhausting all its
+available disk space. Oops! Normally I would prune some Docker images with
+`docker system prune -f` but this time around I couldn't blame Docker, the
+wasted space was due to [cargo](https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/index.html),
+critical part of the Rust development toolchain.
+
+When `cargo` does _anything_ within a project directory, it will store all it's
+working state (dependencies, etc), inside of the `./target/` directory. The
+more projects you work on, the more `target/` directories you will accrue, each
+taking up tens or _hundreds_ of megabytes of disk.
+
+I have adopted [cargo-sweep](https://github.com/holmgr/cargo-sweep) to help
+grapple with the sprawling disk utilization of my local Rust projects. `cargo
+sweep` can be run on a per-project basis or recursively for a file system
+subtree with `-r`. In my case, `cron` is going to make sure that my future free
+space problems will not be cargo's fault!
+
+```
+15 1 * * * ~/.cargo/bin/cargo sweep -r -t 30 ~/source
+```
+
+