Huge disk space usage but I can't find what

Question

My Mac's disk is almost full. I've tried to delete files and checked out my /var/log but can't find any 'big' files.

What can I do to clean up my Macbook's disk space or to find out what is so huge?

Answer 1

Take a look at GrandPerspective. It will show you a map of your files and directories depending on their size, so you can easily guess the location of your big files or directories:

Answer 2

Open terminal, run du -s * which lists the total size of all files in each directory.

cd /  # or cd to where you wish to check for large files    
du -s * | sort -nr | more    

Pick large directories to run find on. this find command will list files exceeding 100,000,000 bytes; you can adjust the actual size specified to suit.

# list files with dir directory which are over 100,000,000 bytes
find dir -size +100000000c -ls

Answer 3

There are two GUI applications for Mac that help visually identify what's taking up disk space: Disk Inventory X and GrandPerspective. If you've ever used KDirStat or WinDirStat then you should be comfortable with it, but even if not it's fairly self-explanatory when you run it.

You can also search by file size in Finder.

Answer 4

You can download and run a program called CCleaner. It removes all those tiny nasty bug files that build up over time. I try to run it weekly. A mac version is available here.