[rvG4]

I recently copied some 10 gigs worth of mp3s on to my desktop from a bunch of cdRoms. From there, I added them to my iTunes music folder which is located in another partition of the same HD (50gb). I did this through iTunes by adding them to my library with the "copy to iTunes music folder" option on in the preferences.

after everything was in, i trashed the mp3s on my desktop and emptied the trash. Since then, the 13 gb partition where I start up from has been reduced to a little under 1 GB of free space. All together, the System, Applications, Users and Library folders only take up like 4 or 5 gb.

I ran Disksweeper and WhatSize and both found a hidden folder called Core on the first level of the HD, same place where Users, Applications, etc are located. this folder takes up 8gb and contains .core files. The names of each file are not very descriptive, just a number followed by ".core"

Does anyone know what these are and if they can be removed safely? I need more space to install applications.

[GoGoReggieXPowars]

You can delete .core files with no problem. They're usually caused by crashing programs, but I'm sure someone else can provide a better description. I used to get them all the time on SGI machines when PowerAnimator would crash hard.

[AndrewP]

Originally posted by GoGoReggieXPowars:
You can delete .core files with no problem. They're usually caused by crashing programs, but I'm sure someone else can provide a better description. I used to get them all the time on SGI machines when PowerAnimator would crash hard.

A core file contains the contents of system memory when the kernel panics or the contents of memory associated with a particular process when it crashes. Using debugging tools one can analyze the core file to determine where/why a system crashed. If you are working with Apple tech support on a problem they will likely ask you to send them some core files.

Under normal circumstances you can just delete them. If your system is crashing a lot then you might want to keep them and call tech support.