There seems to currently be no way of getting a list of what the OS considers purgeable files in order to delete them, but there are some candidates to consider, such as cached files.
This particular file can grow quite large, and once removed reduces the purgeable data size;
/System/Library/Caches/com.apple.coresymbolicationd/data
To get an idea of the size of the file, you can run ls
as the sudo
user;
sudo ls -la /System/Library/Caches/com.apple.coresymbolicationd/data
A search for the file provides a few links to queries on its size, such as this Q&A here.
Details on the file itself are scarce, but it seems related to symbol lookup for crashed and problematic processes; as is evidence in this linked Q&A, with more information this post. Follow on the Q&A linked above, it does seem safe enough to delete, this file.
Removal of the file would need to be done with sudo
, details are provided in the Q&A post. The gist of it is to move (as sudo
) the file to somewhere in your home directory (e.g. ~/Documents/SymbolDataDelete
), reboot the machine and then delete the file.
Note: the symbol file will be created again, this appears to be normal, but you should be able to better manage the size it consumes if it becomes too large.
Warning: using sudo
can be dangerous... use with care.
On the expected results; I don't anticipate that this single file will be the sole contributor to the purgeable data (assuming the cloud drive is off etc.), but it did clean up about 95% of the purgeable data I had.
General observations
It may seem obvious, but a reboot cleans out a lot of the temporary and cached content. Give it a few minutes after the restart. Personal observations have been that after a couple of weeks, a reboot cleans up in the order of a gig of purgeable space...