I am not a Packrat!

April 30th, 2007 | jchaager | commentary, programming, software, technology

I found an interesting program for OS X today called GrandPerspective. It’s intended to give you a visual representation of the space consumption on your hard drive. So I ran it on my work laptop and discovered that I had a bunch of space consumed in by old files.

Being the fastidious guy that I am, I went through and started deleting old stuff. A few directories here, a file or two there. Once that was done, it was time to tell OS X to empty the trash. So, it popped up the dialog and started counting what needed to be deleted.

100 200 500 1,000 10,000 100,000

That’s pretty normal given the way OS X applications are created and that I had a bunch of old source code I was deleting.

200,000 500,000 1,000,000

Hmm. That’s a lot of files. I wonder where in the world all those files came from.

1,100,000 1,200,000 1,300,000

There must have been a ton of small files in those directories I deleted.

Where did it finally end up? I’ll let the screen shot speak for itself, but I think I need to do this more often….

Updated 10:50AM: When all was said and done, I ended up reclaiming over 10GB of space on my hard drive. I certainly need to try this on the machine at home and see what kind of detritus I can find there.