Monday 15 February 2021

I learn something new each and every day - finding big files on macOS

 This came up in the context of a colleague trying to work out what's eating his Mac's disk.

Whilst I'm familiar with using the built-in Storage Management app, which includes a Recommendations tab: -


I'd not realised that there's an easy way to look for files, based upon size, using the mdfind command: -

mdfind "kMDItemFSSize >$[1024*1024*1024]"

/System/Library/dyld/dyld_shared_cache_x86_64
/System/Library/dyld/dyld_shared_cache_x86_64h
/System/Library/dyld/dyld_shared_cache_arm64e
/System/Library/dyld/aot_shared_cache
/Applications/HCL Notes.app
/Applications/Docker.app
/Users/hayd/Virtual Machines.localized/Ubuntu.vmwarevm
/Users/hayd/Library/Containers/com.docker.docker/Data/vms/0/data/Docker.raw
/Applications/Microsoft Excel.app
/Applications/iMovie.app
/Applications/Microsoft Word.app
/Applications/Microsoft PowerPoint.app
/Applications/VMware Fusion.app
/Users/hayd/Virtual Machines.localized/Windows10.vmwarevm

Now my example is looking for really large files - 1024^3 - or, to be more specific, files exceeding 1 GB in size, but it's good to know .....

Visual Studio Code - Wow 🙀

Why did I not know that I can merely hit [cmd] [p]  to bring up a search box allowing me to search my project e.g. a repo cloned from GitHub...