i'm doing a little cleaning/archiving on my computer, looking for bulk and seeing if i can either compress it, get rid of it, or archive it. i've found something interesting though and i'm not sure what to do about it. my Applications folder in my Home directory is saying that there's roughly 700 MB of stuff in there, but the combined total of those files and folders in there only add up to maybe 10% of that. so i go to the terminal and use what little i know and do a "ls -a" of this folder. turns out there are two ".$$ StuffIt Temp [number]" hidden files in there. it makes sense that they would be the culprit, always uncompressing files and using the temp space as storage. so i'm figuring i'd like to get rid of these guys. i tried to "rm" them but that's not working, giving an error that seems to be caused by the spaces in the name or the dollar sign or maybe the fact that it's hidden. assuming it's alright to get rid of these things, what can i do to free up that space?
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StuffIt temp files and the Terminal
- Thread starter ifjake
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nevermind i should have searched before posting. using single quotes around the file name removes the special meaning of certain characters, the dollar sign being one of them. i don't know what that special meaning is, but hopefully i didn't kill something. otherwise those two files were the chaff i was trying to remove. now the size of the folder makes sense with what's in it.
You need to either:
Escape the spaces (and $ signs) with a \ so rm A File Name becomes rm A\ File\ Name
OR
Put the name in quotes: rm "A File Name"
Your terminal should autocomplete on hitting tab as well. So try rm .$[tab]
Escape the spaces (and $ signs) with a \ so rm A File Name becomes rm A\ File\ Name
OR
Put the name in quotes: rm "A File Name"
Your terminal should autocomplete on hitting tab as well. So try rm .$[tab]