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My MacBook hard drive is full. I have tried some common methods such as emptying the Trash and rebooting in Safe Mode, but these haven't helped. So I ran a Perl script with root privileges via sudo which adds up file sizes, and I found that the InstallerSandboxes directory is eating up most of my disk space.

It can be found on multiple locations, so I suppose it's hardlinked. It has a .PKInstallSandboxManager subdirectory which contains 4 subdirectories with names in format: *SOME-UUID*.activeSandbox. They all have huge sizes: 16.42GB, 18.72GB, 18.76GB and 29.27GB, all of which add up to 83.19GB.

All of them contain a Root/Application/Xcode.app so I suppose they are all related to Xcode which is installed on my device (I have an /Application/Xcode.app too).

I don't suppose all 4 of them are in use, how can I get rid of the ones that aren't in use?

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I've originally added the question because I didn't have enough space to update XCode. I ended up removing then reinstalling it. But things have gotten worse, last time I uninstalled it and then I got the error that I can't reinstall it because there isn't enough space. So desperate times call for desperate measures, I have deleted the 4 directories mentioned in the question which gave me 30GB extra space. I did it with sudo an mc and mc reported it deleted around 1400000 files, it's ridiculous! So then I could reinstall XCode and it seems to be working without problems.

Edit: To free up additional space go to About This Mac > Storage > Manage > Developer. In there XCode Caches was 15Gb on my computer. You can delete it and the next time XCode runs it will recreate some of it but only a couple GBs.

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  • Hey soger there was any problem after the deletion of the .activeSandbox files from the /Library/InstallerSandboxes/.PKInstallSandboxManager? I'm kind like with the same problem, have about 39G in failed xcode updates hanging on that folder.
    – ooredroxoo
    Commented Mar 10, 2021 at 18:15
  • @ooredroxoo Nope, I've worked with Xcode a lot since I wrote the answer and no problems whatsoever.
    – soger
    Commented Mar 10, 2021 at 22:43

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