[dragnfly]

Hi guys,

Wonder if anyone can help me out.
My usual setup is that I partition my hd. I now have 4 partitions (really for organizational purposes than optimizational). My OS partition has 5 gig total. It has Panther and Classic. For the longest time, it was steady with 1.6gig free space. It wud go down to the hundreds due to swapfile increase. This was never really a problem because a simple restart wud get rid of all previous swapfiles and id be back to 1.6gigs of free space.

But 2 days ago, i noticed it go down to 600+ mb... so as usual, id just do a restart to get all my space back. I use Xupport to check the number of swapfiles... (dont want to go thru terminal) usually when my space gets down i accumulate around 5 swapfiles. But that day, it was only two swapfiles before i did the restart. I thought it was funny but didnt think anything of it.

After the restart, sure enough, i'm back to one swapfile BUT instead of having a starting free space of 1.6 gig in my OS partition, i only have 800+mb! i've been looking through the invis files etc etc and dont see anything that might have eaten up 800+ mb worth of space in a day.

I didnt install anything new, and my home folder is in another partition so that my prefs wudnt further eat up space from my OS partition. The only thing i've been doing out of the ordinary was backing up stuff to DVD-RWs with Toast 6.

Anyone have any idea where my 800mb went?

Running 10.3.2 Pb 17" rev a. 1gig RAM 60Gb HD partitioned to 4.

Thanks in advanced!

[dtriska]

http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnidisksweeper/

[dragnfly]

I've been looking further and further at suspiciously large files at that particular OS partition and might have found out which was taking all the space.

In the tmp folder -- which is inside private/var -- at the OS partition of my hd. A number of folders containing a .img file which I was mounting at the day 800+mb was taken up also had the same day as the date modified timestamp.

So assuming that my search is over... i'm ready to delete these files to get my space back... i just want to make sure that deleting from the tmp folder -- more specifically, [partiion name]/private/var/tmp -- won't have any adverse affect on my system. So for those gurus who know whether or not it is safe to delete from this folder... i'm waiting for a signal here

Thanks!

[Ω]

It is the swap file for virtual memory. These will always be created.

Also 5GB for your OS is too small, and things might get a little hinky when your swap files get too big.

As for deleting them, most people do a restart as you have been doing. Never actually heard of someone just deleting the file

[Chuckit]

Originally posted by _?_:
It is the swap file for virtual memory. These will always be created.

Virtual memory swapfiles go in /private/var/vm and are named "swapfile" followed by a number. These are not swapfiles; they're (surprise!) temporary files of some sort. I strongly doubt deleting them would do any harm. If they've persisted in a tmp folder across restarts, it sounds like cruft. But I'm no sort of Unix guru, so you may want to wait until one of them shows up.