Remove documentation to save hard drive space

According to the Ubuntu wiki, you can instruct dpkg not to install any documentation. This should prevent any documentation (except copyright info) from being installed by apt.

Create a file /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/01_nodoc which specifies the desired filters. Example:

path-exclude /usr/share/doc/*
# we need to keep copyright files for legal reasons
path-include /usr/share/doc/*/copyright
# if you also want to remove the man pages uncomment the next line
#path-exclude /usr/share/man/*
path-exclude /usr/share/groff/*
path-exclude /usr/share/info/*
# lintian stuff is small, but really unnecessary
path-exclude /usr/share/lintian/*
path-exclude /usr/share/linda/*

---

Then you can manually remove any documentation already installed:

find /usr/share/doc -depth -type f ! -name copyright|xargs rm || true
find /usr/share/doc -empty|xargs rmdir || true
rm -rf /usr/share/groff/* /usr/share/info/*
rm -rf /usr/share/lintian/* /usr/share/linda/* /var/cache/man/*

If you also want to remove the man pages do:

rm -rf /usr/share/man/*

The example is written for OEMs, but it worked just as well for me. Took my /usr/share/doc/ directory down from ~150MB to ~20MB.

This should remove the documentation for latex-related packages:

sudo apt-get --purge remove tex.\*-doc$

It does save a few hundred MB.

Quick-and-dirty way to find the installed texlive packages (I'm 100% sure there are other ways):

dpkg -l | grep '^ii.*texlive.*doc'

And removing them:

apt-get remove --purge \
  texlive-fonts-recommended-doc texlive-latex-base-doc texlive-latex-extra-doc \
  texlive-latex-recommended-doc texlive-pictures-doc texlive-pstricks-doc