How do I clear caches and free up space on macOS without third party apps?

Caches don't normally use much drive space.

This is how you free up space on your startup drive:

• Empty the Trash in the Dock. 

• Empty the trash in the Photos app.

• Delete unused and unneeded application installers from your downloads folder and desktop.

• Reboot your Mac at least weekly.

• Transfer files that you don’t use daily to an external drive and then delete them from the startup drive and empty the trash. Files that take up the most room are movies, images and music.

• Force Time Machine to delete local snapshots:

About Time Machine local snapshots - Apple Support

• Use Disk Utility to delete APFS snapshots:

View APFS snapshots in Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support 

Yes, you said you didn't want to use third-party app, but...

You can also use apps such as DaisyDisk from Software Ambience (also available in the App Store) or OmniDiskSweeper from Omni Labs.  (I’m unaffiliated with both.) Use them to identify and find the larger files on your drive so they can be relocated to another drive and/or simply deleted if they aren't needed.

I have a saved search in the sidebar of Finder for all files>75MB which I sort in descending size order. It gives me a quick view of what's taking up space.

clear the cache files from user/library files .

have you observe any system storage data taking too much of storage ?

if yes delete this files by checking all those unwanted files from container disk files.

wishwell wrote:

I want to clear caches and subsequently free up some space on my Mac.

Why? It's important to understand the scope of the problem. Are you actually running out of free space? If so, then you need to take some action. But if your only symptom is a very large amount of "System Data", then that may be completely fine.

I used the storage under settings to do that but it does not have functionality like other third party softwares.

Oh yeah.

Using a third party software for this is counter productive because, I need space so it does not make sense to install another software to clear up space.

Unfortunately, this is a problem that usually cannot be solved without 3rd party software. Such apps aren't very large and don't take up much space. If you are that critically low on free storage, then you'll need to manually delete whatever you can find to make room for the 3rd party app. Then you can use it to find where the problem is coming from and correct it.

It is important to identify the actual problem and correct it. Merely deleting files, clearing caches, and freeing up storage is NOT a fix. Until you fix the problem, you will continue to run out of storage.

Full disclosure: I do develop a 3rd party app that has a storage management component. But if you don't want to use mine, use some other one. If Apple had one, I would recommend that instead.

Which cache's are causing problems? I've been using Macs for nearly 20 years and never even noticed them taking any storage, so maybe if you tell us the problem you're having we can help.