[P1] filled up ibook?

[Eagle]

I would recommend against removing live swapfiles, as you stand a good 
chance of hosing your system.

If you have disabled swap on a file, you can safely delete it, because 
OS X will remove any live swapped data from them.  However, as far as I 
have been able to determine, OS X does not come with an application (be 
it command-line or GUI-based) to disable a swap file to allow for this.

Another good solution, one that has been around since the NeXT days, is 
to just reboot when your swap files grow too large. :)

Eagle

On Jan 5, 2004, at 14:27, Mike Wallinga wrote:
> I don't know if this will help you much, but if you are comfortable 
> using the Terminal, this is one thing you can check:
>
> Mac OS X is pretty good at allocating virtual memory on-the-fly as 
> needed - it just creates another swap file on the hard disk whenever 
> it's getting low.  But, it isn't very good at deleting swap files when 
> they're not needed any more.  You can check how many swap files are on 
> the disk by doing on of these two commands at the terminal:
>
> ls /var/vm/
> ls -l /var/vm
>
> (The second command will give you the same information as the first, 
> but with a little more detail, including the size of each swap file.)
>
> If you've got too many of these eating up disk space you should be 
> pretty safe deleting them.  Here is the  Terminal command that will do 
> this:
>
> sudo rm /var/vm/swapfileX (where X is the number of the swapfile you 
> want to delete)
> or
> sudo rm /var/vm/swapfile* will wipe them all out at once.
>
> I just did this to my iBook as I was typing this email - I had four 
> swap files taking up about half a gig of space total.  My iBook has 
> 640 MB of RAM; if the teacher's iBook has less RAM, it could very well 
> have several more swap files.
>
> Anyway, this may or may not be an answer to your question, but it's 
> something you could try.  Hope this helps a little bit!
>
>  - Mike Wallinga
>
> On Jan 5, 2004, at 11:56 AM, Don Hinkle wrote:
>> I was just visiting the local K-8 school, where they have a large 
>> computer lab filled with iMacs and other newer Macs, including a 
>> double-chipped G5.
>> Anyway, the teacher's iBook has a 10G HD but with nothing on it but 
>> apps, (i.e., no big video or photo files) seems almost full up.
>> It's running 10.2.6 (I think).
>> Seems as if I read somewhere about some anomoly in the OS causing it 
>> to look full when it's not really.
>> ?
>> thanks,
>>
>> donald henry hinkle