How the Grinch Stole 45GB of My Hard Drive

[Fred Mallett]

On Saturday, November 30, 2002, at 07:37  AM, Mac OS X Newbies wrote:

>  How the Grinch Stole 45GB of My Hard Drive

if the reboots do not regain the space, you might want to use the
UNIX command 'du'.
 From a terminal (preferably logged in as root), issue the following:

		cd /
		du -sk *   .*

The cd command puts you at the top (also called root) level of your 
system
disk.
the du commands name is disk usage, the s option means summary only, the
k option means translate the report into something useful (Kbyte vs 512
byte blocks), the * means all names in the directory, and the .* means
all hidden names (the .* is not needed if you are logged in as root).

  You will get many permission errors if you are not root, thus you may
not find where the stuff is hiding unless you enable root login, and use
that account.

  This will take a bit of time to run, but will report which upper level
directory is taking up all that space, then you can work your way down
into that directory (folder) to find the problem. Recently I was 
cleaning
up a machine before passing it on to my girlfriend, and could not seem
to regain the space from deleted files.... finally found it all in 
/.Trashes

fred mallett
dageek at spigeek.com