ev

A filesystem cleaner and disk space analyzer for Linux and FreeBSD.

ev scans your system for reclaimable space: build artifacts, package caches, AI model caches, browser data. Then lets you clean up interactively or in bulk.

Install

Quick install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ErickJ3/ev/main/install.sh | bash

Downloads the latest binary for your platform to ~/.local/bin.

Build from source

Requires Zig 0.16+.

zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseFast

The binary is at zig-out/bin/ev.

Shell completions

Completion scripts are in the completions/ directory:

Bash

mkdir -p ~/.local/share/bash-completion/completions
cp completions/ev.bash ~/.local/share/bash-completion/completions/ev

Zsh

mkdir -p ~/.local/share/zsh/site-functions
cp completions/ev.zsh ~/.local/share/zsh/site-functions/_ev

Make sure the directory is in your fpath before compinit runs (with Oh My Zsh, before source $ZSH/oh-my-zsh.sh). Add to ~/.zshrc:

fpath=("$HOME/.local/share/zsh/site-functions" $fpath)

Fish

mkdir -p ~/.config/fish/completions
cp completions/ev.fish ~/.config/fish/completions/ev.fish

Screenshots

Scan

Clean (interactive)

Analyze

Status

Usage

Scan for reclaimable space

ev scan
ev scan /home/user/projects
ev scan -c dev

Clean interactively

ev clean              # interactive selection
ev clean --dry-run    # preview what would be deleted
ev clean --force      # delete without confirmation
ev clean --dev        # only dev artifacts
ev clean --ai         # only AI/ML caches

Category filters: --dev, --system, --package, --ai, --browser, or -c <name>.

Purge build artifacts from projects

ev purge ~/projects
ev purge ~/projects --depth 5
ev purge ~/projects --dry-run

Walks a directory tree, finds projects by marker files (package.json, Cargo.toml, etc.), and cleans their build outputs.

Analyze disk usage

ev analyze
ev analyze /home --depth 5 --top 20

System status

ev status

Configuration

ev config show
ev config whitelist ~/important-project

Categories

Category	Rules	Examples
dev	24	node_modules, target/, .venv, __pycache__, zig-cache
package	13	npm, pip, cargo, pnpm, yarn, go module caches
system	7	thumbnails, trash, journal logs, font cache
ai	6	Hugging Face, Ollama, PyTorch, Keras, Conda
browser	4	Chrome, Firefox, Chromium, Brave

Configuration

Whitelist — paths ev will never touch:

~/.config/evi/whitelist

One path per line. Lines starting with # are comments.

Operation log — records every deletion with timestamps:

~/.local/share/evi/operations.log

Platforms

• Linux (x86_64, aarch64)
• FreeBSD (x86_64)