Force cleaning of workspace during automated Maven builds

I’ve been using Maven for years, but once in a while forget to ‘clean‘ before building, resulting in old artifacts being included in the output. This can be problematic when refactoring for security items. Thankfully, it is very easy to add a ‘clean‘ step to your pom.xml to force clean each build.

BONUS – the plugin has some additional capabilities, specifically you can specify files outside of ‘target’ to be removed. This can be useful for any custom reporting or logging that you might create.

The Maven clean plug-in can be added to the pom.xml as such:

<build>
<plugins>
<plugin>
<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-clean-plugin</artifactId>
<version>${maven-clean-plugin.version}</version>
<executions>
<execution>
<id>auto-clean</id>
<phase>initialize</phase>
<goals>
<goal>clean</goal>
</goals>
</execution>
</executions>
</plugin>

REFERENCES:

Remove old Ubuntu kernels

If you update your Ubuntu kernel frequently, eventually you will come to the realization that it is taking a lot of space to keep the old versions around on disk. Another annoyance is that your Grub loader will show a very long list. Sure, you can keep them around forever, should you need to recover them, but for most people it’s safe to remove them. You can manually select and remove the packages in Synaptic, but the easiest way I’ve found is to sun the following script instead. It will remove all old kernel version (except the current one!):

dpkg -l 'linux-*' | sed '/^ii/!d;/'"$(uname -r | sed "s/\(.*\)-\([^0-9]\+\)/\1/")"'/d;s/^[^ ]* [^ ]* \([^ ]*\).*/\1/;/[0-9]/!d' | xargs sudo apt-get -y purge

Occasionally, you might also want to follow that with the following to clean up other artifacts too…
sudo apt-get autoremove

REFERENCES:

Linux/Windows file cleanup

If you make heavy (or even typical) use of your computer, you’ll often notice that it just doesn’t seem as fast as it once was. For a slight increase in performance, disk space and to generally remove some of the ‘temporary’ files/cruft that are routinely written to disk you have a few options.

Here are a few of my current favorites for doing ‘Spring Cleaning’ on my computers… BleachBit and CCleaner

BleachBit is available on all major platforms (Windows, OS/X, Linux).