Iritscen
Mr. Grumpikins
Table of Contents (hehe)
I. The Back-Story (read if you want to know why I want to know what I want to know)
II. The Geeky Questions (skip here if you want)
I. Okay, I'm no expert on OS X or its underpinnings. But I do like to hack my Macs using what little knowledge I have (hey, I've only fried one OS install and that was years ago! I learned my lesson about proper use of ResEdit!).
Those who use Snapz Pro X know that it doesn't allow you to change where the scratch files go. You can choose where the saved movie goes with a little finagling if you don't like the default locations it offers, but that's documented elsewhere. Back on the subject of scratch files, the reason this is so colossal a problem is that the scratch files are not (well, usually not) compressed and the usage is massive and like most people I have more space on external drives than the internal drive.
So, this led me to the simple question, where is that freakin' scratch file? Hint #1 was that Ambrosia says that you'd have to relocate your home folder to an external drive to move the scratch file. Hmm, ~ is a big cavernous place. Still couldn't find it. So I used a fantastic app with a terrible name, called fseventer, which monitors FSEvents (duh), and lo and behold, the scratch file is in:
/private/var/folders/[it gets hairy after this and pathnames vary from system to system]. Apparently that's a place Leopard designated for user caches. According to these guys, there's only supposed to be two folders in /private/var/folders, and I have four: eY, ef, zB, and zz. Hmm, that's illuminating. The tricky thing is, system caches are supposed to go in one randomly-named folder and user caches in the other. I'm guessing that in my case the e- folders are both for user caches and the z- folders are for the system... or the other way around. But probably I'm right. (The scratch file is in a subfolder of eY.)
II. This leads me to wonder two things:
A. I'm new to this whole symlink business, but in theory couldn't I symlink /private/var/folders/eY to a location on an external drive? I'm guessing that if that external drive were ever disconnected the %$^& would hit the fan when something tried to access that cache, though.
B. Is there a way to hook into a specific app and when it tries to access a directory, you can redirect it? A bit of a stretch, I know.
If anyone has an alternate way to move that scratch file, I'm all ears. It seems that even though this program is well-known and the limitation equally notorious, there hasn't been a lot said about it on the Net, so this is our opportunity to discover something novel and have it indexed by Google as an answer to future questioners with this issue on their minds.
I. The Back-Story (read if you want to know why I want to know what I want to know)
II. The Geeky Questions (skip here if you want)
I. Okay, I'm no expert on OS X or its underpinnings. But I do like to hack my Macs using what little knowledge I have (hey, I've only fried one OS install and that was years ago! I learned my lesson about proper use of ResEdit!).
Those who use Snapz Pro X know that it doesn't allow you to change where the scratch files go. You can choose where the saved movie goes with a little finagling if you don't like the default locations it offers, but that's documented elsewhere. Back on the subject of scratch files, the reason this is so colossal a problem is that the scratch files are not (well, usually not) compressed and the usage is massive and like most people I have more space on external drives than the internal drive.
So, this led me to the simple question, where is that freakin' scratch file? Hint #1 was that Ambrosia says that you'd have to relocate your home folder to an external drive to move the scratch file. Hmm, ~ is a big cavernous place. Still couldn't find it. So I used a fantastic app with a terrible name, called fseventer, which monitors FSEvents (duh), and lo and behold, the scratch file is in:
/private/var/folders/[it gets hairy after this and pathnames vary from system to system]. Apparently that's a place Leopard designated for user caches. According to these guys, there's only supposed to be two folders in /private/var/folders, and I have four: eY, ef, zB, and zz. Hmm, that's illuminating. The tricky thing is, system caches are supposed to go in one randomly-named folder and user caches in the other. I'm guessing that in my case the e- folders are both for user caches and the z- folders are for the system... or the other way around. But probably I'm right. (The scratch file is in a subfolder of eY.)
II. This leads me to wonder two things:
A. I'm new to this whole symlink business, but in theory couldn't I symlink /private/var/folders/eY to a location on an external drive? I'm guessing that if that external drive were ever disconnected the %$^& would hit the fan when something tried to access that cache, though.
B. Is there a way to hook into a specific app and when it tries to access a directory, you can redirect it? A bit of a stretch, I know.
If anyone has an alternate way to move that scratch file, I'm all ears. It seems that even though this program is well-known and the limitation equally notorious, there hasn't been a lot said about it on the Net, so this is our opportunity to discover something novel and have it indexed by Google as an answer to future questioners with this issue on their minds.