Mac App For Finding Large Files

Mac OS X Hidden Files & Directories 206-522-3530 Reference • • • • Mac OS X Hidden Files & Directories By Gordon Davisson Copyright (c) 2005, Westwind Computing inc. Mac OS X volumes contain quite a few files and directories (aka folders) that are invisible from the Finder (and many other interfaces). For the most part, they're hidden for good reason -- you generally don't need to worry about them, and in fact, probably shouldn't muck with them unless you know what you're doing. But just in case you find yourself needing to deal with them, here's a quick summary of what they're for. Mac OS X Hidden Files & Directories._whatever These files are created on volumes that don't natively support full HFS file characteristics (e.g.

Find and remove Mac duplicate files. Uninstall Mac unused applications and empty app caches. It can quickly find and remove duplicate photos, music files, videos, documents and other types of files in You can use Mac’s built-in search tool to find large files and then you can delete unimportant. A big pane will slide down, giving you a metric ton of options. Type “Size” into the search box at the top of this window, and then choose File Size for your filter type. Best usb piano keyboard for mac.

Ufs volumes, Windows fileshares, etc). When a Mac file is copied to such a volume, its data fork is stored under the file's regular name, and the additional HFS information (resource fork, type & creator codes, etc) is stored in a second file (in AppleDouble format), with a name that starts with '._'. (These files are, of course, invisible as far as OS-X is concerned, but not to other OS's; this can sometimes be annoying.).DS_Store This file in created by the Finder to keep track of folder view options, icon positions, and other visual information about folders. A separate.DS_Store file is created in each directory to store information about that directory, so you'll find them appearing all over the directory tree, in pretty much every folder you've visited with the OS X Finder. ~/.Trash Used to store files & folders from the boot volume that a particular user has thrown in the trash, but that haven't been erased yet. /.Spotlight-V100 Used to store metadata indexes and indexing rules for Spotlight (version 1.00 apparently).

Only created under Mac OS X 10.4. /Volumes/(whatever)/.Trashes On volumes other than the boot volume, a.Trashes folder is used to hold files & folders that've been put in the trash but not yet deleted. Since each user has their own personal trash can, subfolders are created under.Trashes for different users, named according to their user ID number. For example, if user #501 throws something on a volume named 'Data' into the trash, it'd be moved to a directory named /Volumes/Data/.Trashes/501/. Permissions on this folder are set so that you can only access a trash can if you can guess the users' ID -- that is, you cannot view a list of which users actually have trash cans in existance. If you're trying to free disk space, this can make it rather tricky to find & delete the files in other users' trash cans. This contains a list of files for the Finder to hide -- it's one of a file can be made invisible in OS X.

This file is semi-obsolete -- i.e. It does not exist in a standard installation of Mac OS X 10.4, but the Finder will still respect it if it exists. /.hotfiles.btree Used to track commonly-used small files so their position on disk can be optimized (a process called ). /.vol This pseudo-directory is used to access files by their ID number (aka inode number) rather than by name. For example, /.vol/234886 is file #105486 on volume #234881034. Used to handle 'quasi-static' mounts of network volumes under OS X 10.1. Under most unixes, if a network volume is statically mounted on a client, it's mounted somewhere in the file system, so it looks shows up like a normal directory.