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

[TheMacintoshLady]

Vicki Schalin tapped out this message on 11/30/2002 10:40 AM 

> But they were deleted by the system gradually without 
>restart, so OSX can really reuse and delete old swapfiles. So the 
>statement "the only thing that gets rid of them is rebooting" from 
>above is not true. But a quick way to get rid of them is of course to 
>reboot...:-)

I am still unclear as to why they do not delete as they should...
  
>Considering nightly janitorial work I must admit that I leave my 
>machine on all the time, so all automatic setups are original. On the 
>other hand I use my computer lots at night, so maybe the janitor 
>isn't so effective? This I don't know enough about yet...:-)

My machines are on all the time.....is it necessary to shut down then for 
this to work?  Then as you said, rebooting will delete them anyway...so I 
guess the question is how to do it without rebooting?