How the Grinch Stole 45GB of My Hard Drive

[Aaron Dickey]

I wish I could provide some actual _information_ about my problem, but 
I'm afraid I can't say much except the basic facts. I'm using a 17-inch 
iMac, 512MB, 80GB. In practice, of course, that 80GB was more like 
60-65GB, which is fine. Except that sometime during the last 3 days or 
so (if that long) around 40GB of that space has simply disappeared. As 
I type this, I've got a drive with 18.51 GB available, and for the life 
of me I can't figure out why. I used the find command to search for 
files by size, but there's nothing there out of the ordinary. I have 
download perhaps 1-2GB of software and data over the last week, but 
most of that I haven't even unstuffed yet.

I've done a million Get Infos on files, folders, groups of files and 
folders, etc. The only place that is showing a grossly inflated size is 
my own Users/Me folder (Get Info says it's 47.34GB), but when I look at 
it, either in the Finder or in Unix,  simply does not show anywhere 
near that much space being used for the files that are visible.

Now I know that with Unix, programs and files can sometime end up in 
strange places, and can often end up being invisible, so I thought I'd 
post here in case somebody could let me know of any Stupid Unix Tricks 
(or OS X Tricks) that might help find out what's suddenly sucking up 
half my drive space, 'cause I'm stumped.

Thanks,
--Aaron*-