As someone who works with a lot of Java (or other JVM related) projects, I often notice my $HOME/.m2 local maven cache grows quite big over time. This is due to a natural result of a lot of mvn install and other equivalent commands, that build and install the project jars locally (some large projects such as Apache Hadoop end up requiring the use of the local repository instead of built targets, to resolve their inter-dependencies).
More often than not, when working on such projects, the version is usually set to a SNAPSHOT styled one, for example spark-streaming-flume_2.10/1.5.0-SNAPSHOT, and these can be deleted away when you are no longer working on the project. Here’s the simple command I use to erase them away:
find $HOME/.m2 -type d | grep SNAPSHOT\$ | xargs rm -rf