When your computer is getting full, BleachBit quickly frees disk space. When your information is only your business, BleachBit guards your privacy. With BleachBit you can free cache, delete cookies, clear Internet history, shred temporary files, delete logs, and discard junk you didn"t know was there.
Designed for Linux and Windows systems, it wipes clean thousands of applications including Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari, and more. Beyond simply deleting files, BleachBit includes advanced features such as shredding files to prevent recovery, wiping free disk space to hide traces of files deleted by other applications, and vacuuming Firefox to make it faster. Better than free, BleachBit is open source.
BleachBit has many useful features:
- Delete your private files so completely that "even God can"t read them" according to South Carolina Representative Trey Gowdy.
- Simple operation: read the descriptions, check the boxes you want, click preview, and click delete.
- Multi-platform: Linux and Windows
- Free of charge and no money trail
- Free to share, learn, and modify (open source)
- No adware, spyware, malware, browser toolbars, or "value-added software"
- Translated to 64 languages besides American English
- Shred files to hide their contents and prevent data recovery
- Shred any file (such as a spreadsheet on your desktop)
- Overwrite free disk space to hide previously deleted files
- Portable app for Windows: run without installation
- Command line interface for scripting and automation
- CleanerML allows anyone to write a new cleaner using XML
- Automatically import and update winapp2.ini cleaner files (a separate download) giving Windows users access to 2500+ additional cleaners
- Frequent software updates with new features
Going beyond standard deletion of files, BleachBit has several advanced cleaners:
- Clear the memory and swap on Linux
- Delete broken shortcuts on Linux
- Delete the Firefox URL history without deleting the whole file—with optional shredding
- Delete Linux localizations: delete languages you don"t use. More powerful than localepurge and available on more Linux distributions.
- Clean APT for Debian, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and Linux Mint
- Find widely-scattered junk such as Thumbs.db and .DS_Store files.
- Execute yum clean for CentOS, Fedora, and Red Hat to remove cached package data
- Delete Windows registry keys—often where MRU (most recently used) lists are stored
- Delete the OpenOffice.org recent documents list without deleting the whole Common.xcu file
- Overwrite free disk space to hide previously files
- Vacuum Firefox, Google Chrome, Liferea, Thunderbird, and Yum databases: shrink files without removing data to save space and improve speed
- Surgically remove private information from .ini and JSON configuration files and SQLite3 databases without deleting the whole file
- Overwrite data in SQLite3 before deleting it to prevent recovery (optional)
BleachBit 6.0.2 release notes:
All Platforms
New Features
- Add cleaning support for Visual Studio Code, Codium, Antigravity, Cursor, Windsurf, and Devin
- Add support for multiple browser profiles on Chrome and Edge
- Add cleaner for Claude Code
- Add DNS cache cleaner
- Clean AI models from Google Chrome
- When shredding a filename, reduce data remnants and speed up shredding files
- Convert Apache OpenOffice (formerly called OpenOffice.org) cleaner from Python to CleanerML
- Add options to deep scan for developers: venv, __pycache__, node_modules, and .angular
- Clear clipboard after shredding files from paste operation
User interface and performance
- Limit the line width of long warning text
- Improve the logic that triggers the notice during startup about Expert Mode
- During deep scan, skip directories listed in the keep list to improve the speed of scanning
- Stop trying to rename files when an error is not retryable
- Respond to keyboard interrupt (Ctrl+C) when shredding filenames
- Warn when the configuration file is not writable
- Disable the chaff controls while generating chaff
Bug Fixes
- If there are errors reading the cookie keep list, then it will abort the cookie cleaning process to avoid removing important cookies
- Fix: crash in recognition of local cleaners
- Fix: GUI stops loading if recognition fails
- Fix: cleaner loading with invalid data types
- Fix crash with certain Unicode on the CLI
- Fix: escape invalid Unicode in system information output
- Fix: allow Unicode in keep/custom lists
- Fix: avoid losing custom theme icons in Vivaldi by not deleting files in the VivaldiThumbnails folder
- Fix DuplicateOptionError when restoring warning preferences
- Improve handling of symlinks in keep list (whitelist)
- Improve reliability when running external processes without waiting
Windows
New Features
- Add %WindowsSystem% variable for c:\windows\system32 and c:\windows\sysnative
- Use native APIs to clear clipboard on Windows
- Shrink the installer and installed size. Re-enable UPX file compression and remove unneeded files. These changes reduced the installer by 700KB, the portable zip by 3MB, and the installed size by 22MB (47%)
Bug Fixes
- Fix potential security issue where a malicious actor could delete arbitrary files when cleaning with elevated privileges (CVE-2026-55567). Issue identified by Zeze with TeamT5.
- Fix access denied errors when clearing the clipboard on Windows
- Fix crash with unpaired surrogate characters on CLI
- Fix anonymization of 8.3 short file names
- Fix handling of unpaired surrogates in keep/custom lists
- Improve robustness of splash screen
Other
- Update NSIS from 3.03 to 3.12 in AppVeyor CI
- Improve installer experience for unsupported Windows
Linux
New Features
- Add AppImage binary to run on most x86-64 Linux systems
- Improve detection of trash on Linux
- Clean Librewolf installed by official .deb
- Clean Transmission installed as flatpak
- Add cleaner for Profanity (chat client)
- Clean Flatpak localizations
Bug Fixes
- Handle disk quota exceeded (EDQUOT) when wiping a path
- Fix: could not run CLI as root under Wayland
- Improve exception handling with snap
- Fix: keep .desktop files whose Exec path is quoted
- Require XDG .desktop files to have "Name" field
- Fix AppStream metadata
- Fix crash on startup when requests was not installed
- Add python3-requests as dependency in RPM and Debian packaging
- Read swapfile information as text
- Fix: drag and drop did not work on Wayland
- Fix detection of snap running
- Suppress ImportWarning (seen on older distribution)
- Handle BrokenPipeError in the CLI (for example, when piping to head)
Other changes
- The download pages now show checksums inline at the bottom, rather than requiring the user to download a file. (All prior validation methods are still available.)
Download: BleachBit 6.0.2 | Portable | ~20.0 MB (Open Source)
View: BleachBit Home page | Screenshot
