I'm trying to free up disk space, and I came across this:
I've read reports of a 600M file, or a 1GB file but never something like this.
Is it safe to delete or does rebooting frequently help clear some of these files?
I'm trying to free up disk space, and I came across this:
I've read reports of a 600M file, or a 1GB file but never something like this.
Is it safe to delete or does rebooting frequently help clear some of these files?
Using things from this link (http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/how_to_recover_missing_hard_drive_space/) I found a file - com.apple.coresymbolicationd of 133GB.
To delete, boot in Safe Mode (Cmd-S before the Apple logo comes up), run a filesystem check, mount the drive and then just sudo rm
the file
rm
doesn't work, but sudo rm
do. (With guidelines of @patrix)
Jan 23, 2016 at 15:29
No. Rebooting doesn't clear cache files in system. You would need to dig into exactly which subsystem creates here caches and determine of there is a way to manually flush them or move them to trash and then reboot to see when/how/what size they get recreated.
I would boot to single user mode and use rm
to clear that file since nothing is using it then. You could also use sudo mv /System/Library/Caches/com.apple.coresymbolicationd/data /tmp
and then reboot. After the reboot you can delete the file from /tmp
with sudo rm /tmp/data
.
My hunch is you have Xcode installed and have introduced a large number of symbols into your database from one or more iOS versions so that Xcode can symbolicate crash dumps to assist in debugging apps using Xcode. However, it could also be a bug and whenever that subsystem starts recycling the cache, it will clear itself. If you can limit the number of SDK you use in Xcode, that might help as well. My feeling is the people with 60m files don't use Xcode, those with 1MB developer for one version of iOS at a time and those with larger size databases have multiple OS X and iOS SDK activated from within Xcode.
Just to pile on here...
I ROUTINELY delete the contents of the various Caches folders on my Macs and have since O/S X came out. By routinely, I mean "when I have a problem that might be caused by a damaged cache file."
I will also use utilities like Onyx
to do the same thing from time to time, as it does other maintenance things at the same time.
They are temporary files and, just like on Windows, can safely be deleted. I will often reboot after deleting them, just to be safe but regardless the contents of those directories can be safely deleted.
One thing to note, if that file keeps getting created and is VERY large like it is now, then you have some troubleshooting to do.
ROUTINELY
clearing caches. They exist for a reason.
Apr 20, 2016 at 9:10
I ran Mavericks Cache Cleaner to clean out all my Caches folders - the user ~/Library/Caches
folder, the top-level /Library/Caches
folder, and the system's /System/Library/Caches
folder, including a 2GB coresymbolicationd
. Nothing bad seems to have happened as a result (and I reclaimed some disk space).
It is probably wisest to do this the way the OP eventually did it, namely, boot with Safe Mode, clean the caches, and reboot.
I do not feel, however, that we are getting to the bottom of this. 9GB is big. What is causing such a large file to accumulate? I don't think we know that. Deleting the cache deals only with a surface manifestation of something that may have a deep cause.
ton
again, and the coresymbolicationd
is 729M.
Mar 6, 2014 at 21:23
root
viasudo GrandPerspective.app/Contents/MacOS/GrandPerspective
and found that my/System/Library/Caches/com.apple.coresymbolicationd
is 3.0 GB. I am running 10.10.3 Yosemite and I have Xcode and the latest command line tools package installed.