advanced-use.adoc

Advanced use

Table of Contents

• Advanced use
  • Cleaning garbage only from specific applications
  • Cleaning garbage by categories
  • Cleaning garbage by entity categories
  • Cleaning garbage by its type
  • Cleaning by your own custom categories
  • Mix cleaning rules
• A note on command option execution priority

Advanced use

By default, running the constUP Garbage Cleaner will clean up all files, directories and/or registry entries which are active in your cleanup list. However, you can further fine tune what exactly you want to be deleted.

Note	Even when using custom options in the cleaning command, constUP Garbage Cleaner will still delete only active ones. Inactive cleaning rules stay inactive and will be ignored, until you explicitly want to activate them.

Important

All constUP Garbage Cleaner commands have an option to either use the default cleanup list or your custom one. To make this documentation shorter, we will not mention instructions for the custom cleanup list anymore - but it’s available. Just use the -cleanupListFile option and set the path to your own cleanup list.

Cleaning garbage only from specific applications

To clean garbage produced by a specific application, run:

pwsh .\constup-garbage-cleaner.ps1 -clean -applications "Firefox"

or clean multiple applications with:

pwsh .\constup-garbage-cleaner.ps1 -clean -applications "Firefox,Chrome"

Remember, you can list the names of available applications with:

pwsh .\constup-garbage-cleaner.ps1 -listApplications

Cleaning garbage by categories

• category - category of the application, like "IDE", "game", "browser",…​

Categories documentation

To clean garbage by category, for example, only clean garbage from browsers and/or IDEs, run:

pwsh .\constup-garbage-cleaner.ps1 -clean -categories "browser"

or clean multiple categories with:

pwsh .\constup-garbage-cleaner.ps1 -clean -categories "browser,IDE"

Remember, you can list all available categories with:

pwsh .\constup-garbage-cleaner.ps1 -listCategories

Cleaning garbage by entity categories

• entity_category - category of the garbage entity itself, like "log", "crash log", "installation backup",…​

To clean up garbage by entity category, for example, only clean logs and crash logs, run:

pwsh .\constup-garbage-cleaner.ps1 -clean -entityCategories "log"

or, clean multiple entity categories with:

pwsh .\constup-garbage-cleaner.ps1 -clean -entityCategories "log,crash log"

Remember, you can list all available entity categories with:

pwsh .\constup-garbage-cleaner.ps1 -listEntityCategories

Cleaning garbage by its type

If you want to clean only files, or registry entries, run:

pwsh .\constup-garbage-cleaner.ps1 -clean -types "file"

or, clean multiple types with:

pwsh .\constup-garbage-cleaner.ps1 -clean -types "file,registry value"

Remember, you can view the list of all available types with:

pwsh .\constup-garbage-cleaner.ps1 -listTypes

Cleaning by your own custom categories

If some rules in your cleanup list have the optional custom_category property, you can use the contents of this property to filter out which entities to delete. Simply run:

pwsh .\constup-garbage-cleaner.ps1 -clean -customCategories "your category,some other category"

Remember, you can get a list of all available custom categories (which you have defined) with:

pwsh .\construp-cleaner.ps1 -listCustomCategories

Mix cleaning rules

You can mix two or more cleaning rules, and they will all be applied when cleaning:

pwsh .\constup-garbage-cleaner.ps1 -clean -applications "Firefox,Chrome" -entityCategories "log,crash log"

In this case, the cleaner will process all rules which are active, have "Firefox" or "Chrome" as their application and belong to "log" or "crash log" entity categories.

A note on command option execution priority

If you do something like this:

pwsh .\constup-garbage-cleaner.ps1 -clean -customCategories "some category" -applications "JetBrains" -listActive

you will notice that it will not run the cleaning process, but list the active cleaning rules instead. This is because command options have priorities of execution. Whichever option has the highest priority will be executed, regardless of the position of the option in your command on terminal. In our case, -listActive has the higher priority than -clean, even though it is written after -clean.

Here is the list of command options, sorted from the highest to the lowest priority:

• help

• listActive

• listInactive

• listApplications

• listCategories

• listEntityCategories

• listTypes

• listCustomCategories

• dryRun

• clean

This is implemented to ensure that each script execution has one purpose and one purpose only - in order to reduce bugs and potential unwanted side effects when running constUP Garbage Cleaner.