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Comment by noja | Hacker News Reader

+1 then I can kill my custom "remove oldest kernels, except the running one, and leave at least two other kernels" script.

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Yes, I had this same problem when I was on Xubuntu. Fedora and CentOS(and I'm assuming many other distros) seem to handle kernel updates just fine without forcing me to manually clean out old images from /boot periodically (was always too lazy to write a script).

What Fedora and CentOS do is a generic yum/dnf option: installonly_limit. It allows you to keep limit on the amount of packages with the same name and different versions, kernel included.

would you mind sharing this in the meantime?

I've been using this for years. I believe it only keeps one old kernel version though, not two like you requested. Tested and working for weekly use since 12.04 though 16.04:

echo $(dpkg --list | grep linux-image | awk '{ print $2 }' | sort | sed -n '/'`uname -r`'/q;p') $(dpkg --list | grep linux-headers | awk '{ print $2 }' | sort -n | sed -n '/'"$(uname -r | sed "s/$[0-9.-]*$-$[^0-9]\+$/\1/")"'/q;p') | xargs sudo apt-get -y purge

I guarantee there's a way to get that pipe to purge all packages in your system.

This is the new way to do it:

    sudo purge-old-kernels --keep 3 -qy

TIL

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