Comments on: Find and delete hidden files on Mac

Question: Find and delete hidden files on Mac

wavejumper — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 13:12:33 -0800

Help me find and delete hidden files on my Mac!

I've been using the program Graphics Converter to try to make a large .MOV slideshow out of 1500 JPEG images. It keeps crashing because it runs out of disc space (I think that's why anyway), and then I end up with even less hard drive space available...it's leaving hidden temporary files behind. I've narrowed them down to somewhere in my System folder...about 13 gigs worth, but I can't actually see them. How do I locate them and clean them out?

By: jaimev

jaimev — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 13:22:43 -0800

You can try a disk inventory program like this.

By: cjorgensen

cjorgensen — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 13:22:51 -0800

WhatSize

By: jaimev

jaimev — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 13:23:14 -0800

Sorry about that...like *this*

By: emptyinside

emptyinside — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 13:24:56 -0800

I've always liked GrandPersepective for tracking down hard drive clogs.

By: mkb

mkb — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 13:26:03 -0800

For future reference, GrandPerspective makes this much easier.

To see everything in a particular directory, I like to use the Terminal instead of the Finder. ls -alh will show everything in a directory with human-readable sizes.

Otherwise, you can follow these hints.

By: ayerarcturus

ayerarcturus — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 15:13:24 -0800

If you're not afraid of using the terminal, the 'find' command should be available on your system. Try:

find /path/to/search -name '.*' -type d -print

And you'll get a list of hidden files. If you're 100% certain that every hidden file listed can be deleted, you can run:

find /path/to/search -name '.*' -type d -delete

However, you might want to be careful with that last command. (:

By: sararah

sararah — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 15:27:31 -0800

I just have my hidden files constantly showing because I have often needed to access the some hidden file to run a weird unix program. Anyways here's how to see your hidden files, after you do this they should show up in Finder (mine do). To make them go away obviously do the same command in Terminal with FALSE.

By: harmfulray

harmfulray — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 15:46:03 -0800

Issuing a command such as

find /System -type f -size +1000000c -ls | sort -n -k7

in the terminal will find all regular files at least 1,000,000 bytes long and display them in increasing order of size.

By: KimG

KimG — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 16:26:38 -0800

for this kind of exercise, I usually also use this snippet in the terminal. I have extended it by Harmfulray's nice sort. (copy and paste if you like, you will need to give your password, but that is only to find the really hidden files you normally don't see):

sudo find / -size +200000 -ls| sort -n -k7 -r|head -20

It gives you the 20 largest files on your computer that are larger than 100 MB sorted by the largest first.

Harmfulray-> any reason only to search /System and not / ? Just a cut/paste-error I guess. Nice sort, though!