Deleting remnants of OS X

Mikuro

Mikuro

Crotchety UI Nitpicker
I have an external FireWire HD that I used to have OS X installed on. I deleted the OS a while ago because I didn't use it much and needed the space for other things. Now I need more space, and I realize that there's still quite a lot of the old system lingering around. There's over 700MB in the invisible /usr folder, for example.

My question is, what can I safely delete? I'm not quite sure what's left over from the old OS installation and what's needed for the volume. Here's a list of invisible items on the drive:

Volumes
var
usr
tmp
TheVolumeSettingsFolder
TheFindByContentFolder
sbin
private
Network Trash Folder
Network
mach_kernel
mach.sym
mach
etc
dev
cores
bin
automount
.vol
.TemporaryItems
.Spotlight-V100
.hotfiles.btree
.Trashes

A few of those are symlinks. The only ones that take up significant disk space are 'usr' and 'private', but for the sake of neatness I'd like to get rid of everything that's unnecessary.

What, if anything, should I keep?
 
Hi Mikuro,

I often had the same question, and I deleted (rm -R) all of these files/directories exept Volumes/ without Problems.
I am always unsettled about the Volumes/ directory. All external Volumes are mounted there, so rm -R should delete *all the files on all your drives*. (At least I am afraid of it would;)
So I leave the Volumes/ Directory untouched. All the others: don't mind, go delete them!

BTW: More Advice on the Volumes/ question would be welcome!
 
bobw said:
You could just reformat the drive.
Click to expand...
"Just"? Err...no, because there's 20+GB of stuff on it that I'd rather not lose. :)

I was wondering about /Volumes. Isn't that something that's only valid on the startup disk? I'm not quite sure. In any case, I don't think I'd be using rm (too scary!). I just use TinkerTool to show invisible files in the Finder and drag them to the Trash.

/Volumes and .hotfiles.btree are the two I'm most concerned about.
 
.hotfiles.btree I deleted without having any problems. Using rm -R, I wasn't scared about that. ;)

But as long as /Volumes/ is invisible in the Finder, just keep it where it is until someone comes and enlightens us…
 
BTW - I was too curious about the /Volumes/ directory. So I went to my BackUp-Drive, cd'd there and typed

$ sudo rm -R Volumes (no slash at the end)

The directory is gone - and all other stuff on that drive, which is a bootable clone of my startup disk, is still in place. So I remembered right, some other day I did so without wiping everything out…

The manpage for rm says "The rm utility removes symbolic links, not the files referenced by the links." The files in /Volumes/ are no symbolic links but rm -R doesn't follow the entries. These are sticky directories, owned by root, and sudo has the power to unlink it. Why it doesn't I still don't know.

But as experience shows, one can savely rm it!

(maybe I should use some other signature for threads like these..?)
 
Cool, good to know. But I still find rm too scary! Especially with that "sudo" before it.

The .Spotlight-V100 and .Trashes folders are probably still relevant, but I guess they'd be recreated as necessary (I don't have Spotlight enabled on that drive anyway).

I've reclaimed over 800MB now, which is enough for another round or two of essential back-ups. Thanks for the help!
 
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