Trying to find files to delete but can't

To find out, where you storage capacity is being used, you can use the following free applications:

• DiskInventory X
• OmniDiskSweeper
• JDisk Report
• GrandPerspective

Maybe try a combination of several, if you still can't find the "missing" capacity.

And what exact Mac and Mac OS X version do you have?

 

something like this: http://whatsizemac.com might help. or ccleaner

 

Is there a bunch of stuff sitting in your Trash?

 

Have you taken a look at post #2 and used one or two of the linked applications?

Btw, those temporary files will get recreated upon need, thus deleting caches is sometimes counterproductive.
Five Mac maintenance myths

 

old school

Open the Finder, go to Applications, then Utilities. Start Terminal.

type pwd - this will show you the directory you are starting in - probably /Users/your_name

Which directory did you want to examine? You could cd /<enter> to get to the top of your whole file system.

Once there the following incantation is very useful:

du -a | grep "^[0-9]"

This is disk usage (du), all files (-a) then pipe the output to grep, which is looking for the beginning of a line (^) followed by any single digit between 0-9. You will want to append a few extra [0-9] to the first one, and I would guess you will want to have 5 - 7 of them, so you only see very large files.


Hope that's not too scary for those used to graphical interfaces - it's how an old Unix guy would solve that problem.

 

Focus on your Downloads, Music, Movies, and Pictures folder. Don't delete any other files if you don't know what they are there for. If you do decide to delete items in the Application Support folder, only trash items for applications that you no longer have installed. If you use iPhoto, iMovie, or GarageBand, then don't delete iLifeAssetManagement.