First, let’s see how much macports use up on my system:

$ du -sh /opt
8.1G

Next, how many packages do I have installed in total:

sudo port installed | wc
     538

And how many packages are active:

sudo port installed | grep active | wc
     253

Now let’s trim the entire collection, by uninstalling all inactive packages:

sudo port uninstall inactive

If you have some dependency issues, add ‘-f’ flag to the port command that will ignore dependencies.

This reduced the disk usage in /opt to 4.8G, and got the number of all installed ports to 254.

More cleanup:

sudo port clean --all installed

This removes all temporary files generated while building and installing packages. After that, I got down to 3.6G in /opt. Not bad down from 8.1G.