SOLVED, completely I think.
OK, I think I finally figured it out, if anybody is interested:
If you click:
"History" on the menu bar
"Clear Recent History"
select "Everything" on the drop down menu at the top
check "Cache"
uncheck everything else
click "Clear Now"
What it does in the cache directory for the profile "~/.cache/moonchild productions/pale moon/randomlookingstring.profilename" appears to be:
cache2/entries/ is emptied. Looks like (based on size of files) some of the files are being renamed & moved to cache2/doomed/ but most apparently are deleted.
cache2/index is deleted, not revised.
_CACHE_CLEAN_ contains a single byte & isn't touched. A config file maybe?
These directories and their contents are not touched:
thumbnails/
Cache/
OfflineCache/ - the sole file in this is index.sqlite which is not modified. Cookies maybe?
startupCache/
Some files in cache2/doomed/ aren't affected. Some are deleted. Some appear to have been moved and renamed from files in cache2/entries/
That's all.
= = = = = = = = = = =
None of the buttons that are supposed to put this function on a toolbar did anything like that for me.
Code: Select all
find "/home/user/.cache/moonchild productions" -type f -exec rm -f {} \;
is pretty good, but it deletes a lot more, notably including cookies. Think of it as "Nuke cache, cookies, and all their kin." It is much better than just deleting the whole cache directory because PM immediately resumes it's normal caching, and cookie baking, etc. I'll keep it on my menu. There is a place for nukes.
But I found something that does replicate the exact function of deleting cache through the history menu while making it a lot easier to find & has additional benefits:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... src=search
Works great for me. I configured it as a button that drops down a menu. And one of the preconfigured entries is clear cache. There is a panel mode too, that didn't interest me & I didn't test. As far as I can tell this is doing EXACTLY the same thing as the History,etc. action.
For each of the 3 native functions (1 through the history menu & 2 through the tools menu) and for prefbar, I made before and after summaries of files, directiories, sizes, and mod times using find with file and stat and so on. Then I generated lists of files that stayed the same, changed, disappeared, and were created with comm and sort. The second button in the tools menu was a red herring. It does something else altogether. I haven't studied the comparisons for tools,prefs,advanced,net,cached-web-content,clear-now as closely yet, but it appears to be about the same as the one under the history menu.