[X Newbies] How the Grinch Stole 45GB of My Hard Drive

[Vicki Schalin]

>  > 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.
>
>Have you tried rebooting? You could have a whole bunch of invisible sway
>files (used for virtual memory management).

Swapfiles made my life misserable... You can find them with sherlock, 
they are invisible and resides inside invisible folder .vm on your 
system disk. They are all 76 MB large and are created when the system 
needs to use the RAM for something else than is in it for the time. 
When they are no longer needed they are actually reused and thrown 
away (I have seen it) but that can take some time. After reboot they 
are all gone, and a totally new is created.

FileBuddy is another great tool for finding stuff. If you asks it to 
list all files inside a folder you can actually see all the ivisble 
files and folder as well, and maybe then you can find what is eating 
all your disk space.

/ Vicki
-- 
Vicki Schalin