Folder with large size, nothing in it

[davidwes]

I have a folder that has nothing in it. The computer says though that the folder is 2Gb of data. I transfered the folder to my external harddrive and it did the whole transfer bar going up to 2gb and it took awhile, yet still I see nothing in the folder.

What is going on?

[Eidorian]

Did you use Terminal to see what was in it? Where was the folder located?

[davidwes]

Did you use Terminal to see what was in it? Where was the folder located?

How do you do that?

[davidwes]

Okay. I put the folder on my desktop because I could figure out how to get there in terminal. it still says 2 gb.

In the terminal I have it ~/Desktop/name of folder

I enter ls and press enter and nothing shows up

I tried ls on just the desktop and it showed all the files on my desktop

[louiek]

You might have deleted a file but it's still being used by an application you haven't closed. The space won't free up till you close the app. Open terminal and type:

lsof | grep your_folder_name

that will tell you what files you have open in that folder. A restart would clear it too, assuming this is the case.

[Nermal]

Open Terminal and type these:

cd ~/Desktop/folder name
ls -la (lowercase LS -LA)

Then copy the result and paste back here.