Is there a way to list all unused files which reside inside public file system and inside a theme directory and list them, or maybe even have an option to delete them automatically?
I mean files which are currently not linked from any css stylesheet or from any node.
You can find orphaned files by running the following MySQL query:
SELECT fm.*
FROM file_managed AS fm
LEFT OUTER JOIN file_usage AS fu ON (fm.fid = fu.fid)
LEFT OUTER JOIN node AS n ON (fu.id = n.nid)
WHERE fu.type = 'node' AND n.nid IS NULL
This returns all files which have no associated node. I'm not sure if it's safe to delete the returned rows and files, probably also depends on your module setup. Only use at your own risk!
For those coming to this post three years later, there's a little module you can use to do this called Fancy File Delete.
At the time of this post, it's in beta, so use it at your own risk. As always, cleaning up orphaned anything through DB queries can be sketchy and its success depends heavily on your particular module setup.
Something that may help to identify "files that are no longer attached to nodes or files and directory that are not in the file managed table" (as in the duplicate question about "How to do delete unused files?"), is to use the File Checker module. Some details about it, from its project page:
In a perfect Drupal world your server filesystem and its correspoding entries in Drupal's files table are 100% synchronized. But what if parts of your file system have been corrupted due to some disk failure? Or one of your modules messed up your database and files? Or your deploy script went beserk? Well, then this module will help you to monitor and find out which files are out of sync.
Out of the box the files table has two kind of statuses: Temporary (0) and Permanent (1). The file checker introduces an additional status Missing (2). In scope of the verification process which can be triggered in various ways the status column of the files table is updated.
Features
- Run verification process: on demand, via cron, via drush (in planning)
- File list overview page with filters
- Views integration
- Drush command for file checking
If you want to export the results of a view it's recommended to use views_data_export module.
So what you could do is like so:
Note: even though this question is about D7, the is an (alfa) version of it also for D8.
there is one module that removes unwanted files fancy file delete.
View of all managed files with an option to force delete them via VBO custom actions Manually deleting managed files by FID (and an option to force the delete if you really want to). Deleting unused files from the default files directory that are not in the file managed table. AKA deleting all the unmanaged files. Deleting unused files from the whole install that are no longer attached to nodes & the file usage table. AKA deleting all the orphaned files.
You can delete unused file by
Delete manually from the file_managed table, by some query like
$this->database
->delete('file_managed')
->condition('fid', $fid, '=')
->execute();
Setting the status of a file 0, to mark is as temporary file, so the cron will delete it after certain time.
$file = File::load ($fid);
$file->setTemporary();
The fancy file delete module did not work at all for me. Here is a more manual alternative.
To delete files from a folder that are not in the managed file table you can:
1) Create a list of all the managed files:
mysql whateverdb -e "select filename from file_managed" > ~/managed-files.txt
2) Delete all files from a directory that are not in that list. To do this I used a small bash script:
#!/bin/bash
IMG_FOLDER='/var/www/html/yoursite/docroot/sites/default/files/certain-images'
EXCLUDES='/home/yourhomeuser/managed-files.txt'
for FILE in $IMG_FOLDER/*; do
if ! grep "$FILE" "$EXCLUDES"; then
echo "Deleting $FILE"
rm -f "$FILE"
fi
done
Just change the IMG_FOLDER variable to the path of whatever folder you want to delete files from (and update the path to your excludes file)
There is this module as well that is an alternative to the "fancy delete" https://www.drupal.org/project/unmanaged_files
