Finder says Home Disk is full, utilities say I've only used 93Gb of 232Gb

Take a look at this article I wrote:

http://www.pinkmutant.com/articles/TigerMisc.html

See if it helps. Be sure to check out the information about the /private/var/spool/cups folder and the possiblity of a giant tmp folder there (the article includes instructions on how to get there and a link to help you get rid of the problem).

If everything checks out OK (that is, even the Terminal commands don't find any giant strange file/folders and return the same information about the drive) then the problem would be something wrong somewhere in the Finder.
Francine


Francine
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Try this command:

sudo ls -alh /private/var/spool/cups

It will show the individual files in the cups folder. Is one of them "over the top" in size?
Francine


Francine
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I just found this discussion at the MacFixIt forums. You might read it carefully, and also take a look at the MacOSXHints article mentioned:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20070319143243249

I have a batch of those job history files as well so thought I would try removing them and see what happened. I first got myself a root shell:

NoobiX:~ francine$ sudo -s

Hit return and entered my password, hit return again, then changed directory:

NoobiX:~ root# cd /private/var/spool/cups

Hit return and ran a list command:

NoobiX:/private/var/spool/cups root# ls -al
total 304
drwx--x--- 41 root lp 1394 Mar 26 21:59 .
drwxr-xr-x 7 root wheel 238 Aug 3 2006 ..
-rw------- 1 root lp 3571 Aug 24 2006 c00001
-rw------- 1 root lp 3574 Aug 24 2006 c00002
-rw------- 1 root lp 3505 Dec 8 00:24 c00003
....and so on.... down to
-rw------- 1 root lp 3531 Mar 26 21:59 c00038
drwxrwx--T 2 root lp 68 Dec 21 22:37 tmp

Which verified I was in the right place. I tried removing just one of the files:

NoobiX:/private/var/spool/cups root# rm c00001

which worked fine. I then decided doing this would be tedious, so tried this:

NoobiX:/private/var/spool/cups root# rm -r *

There is a space between the rm and -r and after -r before the * (a wildcard). That was probably a mistake since it not only nuked the history files but also the tmp directory. I should have probably used something like rm -r "c*" (since all the history files begin with c that should have got them and spared the tmp folder). I tried recreating the tmp folder with this:

NoobiX:/private/var/spool/cups root# mkdir tmp

Which seemed to work:

NoobiX:/private/var/spool/cups root# ls -al
total 0
drwx--x--- 3 root lp 102 Jun 7 12:00 .
drwxr-xr-x 7 root wheel 238 Aug 3 2006 ..
drwxr-xr-x 2 root lp 68 Jun 7 12:00 tmp

But being a suspicious sort I ran Disk Utility to Repair Permissions and it did indeed report an error on the /private/var/spool/cups/tmp folder, but it did repair the permissions on the folder successfully, so I'm assuming all is now OK. Of course, I haven't actually tried printing anything yet...

If you choose to try this after you finish type exit and hit return to kill the root shell, then quit Terminal.
Francine


Francine
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PS--Just did some experimenting and discovered the only way to mass delete files in a folder, without deleting the sub-folders, is to use a find/rm combo command. The rm command doesn't support wildcards beyone the simple * (everything). Thus I would have had to do something like this to mass delete the files and leave the tmp folder:

find . -name "c*" -exec rm -rf {} \;

This says "find in the current folder all files whose name begins with c and then delete them." You could also run rm interactively:

rm -ri *

It will then ask you for each item if it should be removed. You type either a y for yes or n for no and hit return. This too would be pretty tedious.
Francine


Francine
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Francine

the only way to mass delete files in a folder, without deleting the sub-folders, is to use a find/rm combo command

Um, if you leave out the "-r", it will not delete any folders.
<pre>

DESCRIPTION
The rm utility attempts to remove the non-directory type files specified
on the command line.

</pre>So, all matthew needs is

sudo rm /var/spool/cups/000*

on the assumption all his 1MB files start with three zeroes.

Ah! Thank you Michael. I rarely use rm and hardly ever use a sudo rm. It makes me nervous.
Francine


Francine
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