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This small article will show you how to remove unused kernels in Red Hat or CentOS. This is sometimes necessary because the /boot partition can fill up.

Are you running Ubuntu and want to clean up kernels? See this article: https://raymii.org/s/snippets/Remove Old Ubuntu_Kernels.html

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You can check which kernels you have installed using the rpm -q kernel command:

$ rpm -q kernel
kernel-2.6.18-348.16.1.el5
kernel-2.6.18-348.18.1.el5
kernel-2.6.18-371.el5
kernel-2.6.18-371.1.2.el5
kernel-2.6.18-371.3.1.el5

As you can see this is a CentOS 5 box.

In the yum-utils package there is the package-cleanup command. This command, among other things, lets you remove older kernels very simple. First install it:

yum install yum-utils

With the following command you can clean up all old kernels and keep just two. The current one and the previous one:

package-cleanup --oldkernels --count=2

The Fedora Documentation has more info and various good examples on the package-cleanup command: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en- US/Fedora/14/html/Software Management Guide/ch07s03.html

Tags: bash , centos , kernel , rhel , snippets , yum