Hoover

Hoover – Clean up temporary files from TeX and Emacs

When TeX/LaTeX is used to format a document, many temporary files are created in the same directory as the source file. Unfortunately, TeX does not offer an easy way to remove these temporary files when they are no longer needed. The Hoover program was designed to take over this job. It also deletes Emacs backup and cache files, and optionally various temporary files created by MacOS, R and Python.

Type perldoc Hoover for more information and usage instructions.

The current version of Hoover v1.0.7.

Installation

Adjust the path to the Perl interpreter (#!/usr/bin/perl) in the first line of the "Hoover" script, if necessary. Then copy the script to a directory in your search path. Typical installation directories are /usr/local/bin for a site-wide installation (usually requires administrator privileges) and ~/bin for a personal installation.

On most Unix systems (including Linux and MacOS), you can install Hoover with one of the following commands:

install -m 755 Hoover /usr/local/bin

or

install -m 755 Hoover ~/bin

Licence

This software is provided AS IS and the author makes no warranty as to its use and performance. You may use the program, redistribute and modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

IN NO EVENT WILL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR ANY CONSEQUENTIAL, INCIDENTAL OR SPECIAL DAMAGES, INCLUDING ANY LOST PROFITS OR LOST SAVINGS, EVEN IF HE HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES, OR FOR ANY CLAIM BY ANY THIRD PARTY.

Copyright (C) 2003–2018 by Stefan Evert (www.stefan-evert.de).

Version history

• 2023-01-07: Version 1.0.7

  • also clean up .vrb files and .ipynb_checkpoints sudirectories
  • new option --other (-o) unconditionally deletes MS Office backup files (starting with ~)

• 2017-05-20: Version 1.0.5

  • now also deletes .spl files generated by the Elsevier manuscript style
  • as well as .bcf and .run.xml files created by biblatex / biber

• 2014-06-17: Version 1.0.4

  • new option --rdata (-R) removes R history and workspace (.Rdata) files (use with caution!)
  • new option --python (-py, -y) removes .pyc bytecode files and __pydata__ subdirectories

• 2013-11-14: Version 1.0.2

  • new option --macosx (-m) removes Mac OS X support files (.DS_Store, extended attributes)
  • various file extensions added (often created by external programs such as latexmk.pl)
  • various improvements and bug fixes

• 2005-06-12: Version 0.99 – first public release