What are the gigantic *.CFS files all about in Ecl

Question

I started to notice my WD drive getting full and ran a size:gigantic file search on it. It has turned up several files here:

F:\SCOTT-SHARED-DESKTOP\My Documents\JPA_SPRING_STRUTS\.metadata\.plugins\org.maven.ide.eclipse\nexus\d9d714e11cb097b3ffcec91cccc65d3e_58.cfs

that exceed 189,992 KB (189 MB)!

Anyone know about these rascals?

Answer 1

Indeed, it's Nexus indexes. You can disable partially or totally Nexus indexes retrieval by right clicking on repositories in the Maven repositories view and checking/uncheking Disable Index Details/Enable Minimum Index/Full Index Enabled (options with M2Eclipse 0.12).

Hereunder a screenshot:

Answer 2

as stacker points out, each of these seem to be a Lucene segment file, with Compound File format. If you want to see what is inside, you can open them with Luke

Answer 3

Every repository that m2eclipse uses is indexed by the Nexus Indexer. If m2eclipse is using a remote repository, it will download a Nexus index from the remote repository. If m2eclipse is managing a local repository (local or workspace) it will use the open source Nexus indexer to create and maintain a local index. This index is what allows you to quickly search for and locate dependencies by artifactId, groupId, version, or classname.

http://books.sonatype.com/m2eclipse-book/reference/repository-sect-repo-view.html#d5e1169

Answer 4

You might also consider unchecking the checkbox (under Window menu, Preferences, Maven):