what happened to the 10 gb? disk inventory question

[yellow]

i want to make it an account again just to see if there is anything important in them. is there any way to do this?

Don't waste your time making an account. Either enable root (not advised), or change the permissions on them so you can look in them.

First off, make sure you know which user directory is actually the one you use. Then use chown to change the permissions on the ones you're not using to be read/write/exec for you.

An example:

sudo chmod -R o+wrX "/Users/Ryan Phillips"

 

[biohazard6969]

ok i did that command in terminal but it came back saying

chown: o+wrX: Invalid argument

what should i do...i think i entered it wrong....

 

[yellow]

That's an o (oh) for "others".

Since I don't know what your normal user's shortname is we'll stick with the "easy mode" version..

Open Terminal, type in:

sudo chmod -R o+wrX

(please note, there needs to be a space after X) and then drag the folder from /Users that you want to get into the Terminal window. It will automatically insert the proper path. Please note, you can only do this for one folder at a time, so you'll have to repeat the above step for each of the user folders you want access to.

Just so you know what it is you're doing (and not blindly following suggestions), chmod is short for "change file modes". The -R flag is for recursion, meaning, apply the following permission rules to every folder and file under the specified folder. The o is for "others" (other args are u for user, g for group), meaning anyone and everyone else that has an account. The + is for add the following permissions changes (the opposite would be - for remove the following permissions changes). And wrX is for write, read, and execute the opening of folders.

All this is available from the man page.

 

[biohazard6969]

ok, its still not workin i don't know wat's wrong, i copied and pasted it and made sure it looked exacly like you showed, i made sure the space after the X and dragged the folder in and hit return and this came up

Ryans-Laptop:~ ryanphillips$ sudo chown -R o+wrX /Users/Ryan\ / 
chown: o+wrX: Invalid argument
Ryans-Laptop:~ ryanphillips$

i tried couple times but the same thing happened.

 

[yellow]

It's now working because I'm a ****ing moron.

Here's the CORRECT command:

sudo chmod -R o+wrX

I will edit the previous flubs.

 

[biohazard6969]

ok i did that to get rid of the one user, but one of them still remains and it still won't let me even open the user FOLDER, it looks like this inside the users folder.

when i try and open it it jsut says "the folder "ryan" could not be opened because you do not have sufficient access privileges" even though i did that terminal entry with the folder

 

[Makosuke]

Ryans-Laptop:~ ryanphillips$ sudo chown -R o+wrX /Users/Ryan\ / 
chown: o+wrX: Invalid argument
Ryans-Laptop:~ ryanphillips$

Interesting, it looks like that user folder has a space in its name--that's very odd. I don't believe OSX will create short usernames with capitals or spaces in them, so something else must've created it.

I'm deferring to Yellow on the Unix commands here, but wouldn't doing a "chown -R ryanphillips /Users/Ryan\ /" be another way of getting to what's in there, providing he only wants to get at the files to see what's in them? That command, if I'm remembering correctly, should take ownership of the folder and the files within in.

 

[biohazard6969]

ok well then if this is an 'abnormal' user folder....a) what is it doing in my users folder b) if something ELSE 'must have made it' then what? i havn't used anything serious on this computer that would need to make its own user folder. c) how do i gain permissions for it. and i know that i MADE this user folder, i remember it, it got rele screwed up after i downloaded some weird program so i had to abandon the account. i can still jsut delete it my entering my admin password for my current account, but i'd still like to see what is in it

 

[Mechcozmo]

ok, now this is REALLY weird. i only have 2 functional accounts on my computer, one entitled Ryanphillips, and the other is Owner. but in the users folder i found that there were these: Ryan Phillips; ryan_phillips; ryanphillips....why are these here. these are obviously the source of the missing GB. i used to have users named this, but i thought i deleted them. since it looks as though i didn't delete them properly, how can i see what is in them. it says i don't have sufficient privilages. i want to make it an account again just to see if there is anything important in them. is there any way to do this?

When you delete an account you have the option of deleting it NOW or deactivating it, but not trashing the files yet.

If you Get Info on the folder, you can set the Permissions. But after you screw around with everything, make sure to Repair your Permissions!

 

[biohazard6969]

YESSSS!!!!!!!!!! thank you all!!!!!! i FINALLY have that other 10 GB back!!!! YESSSS!!!!!!!!!

 

[Mechcozmo]

YESSSS!!!!!!!!!! thank you all!!!!!! i FINALLY have that other 10 GB back!!!! YESSSS!!!!!!!!!

So you're gonna ditch that ugly WinXP theme now?

 

[biohazard6969]

lol yea i already did, see this post

the damn thing screwed up tiger!!!! ARG!!!!

 

[mkrishnan]

Not that it's the original problem here, but since we're discussing lost space, I found an interesting one today. I downloaded a linux image from FreeOSZoo. Sadly, to get a little extra file compression, they compress three or four times (something like .gz.tar.bz2 or similar). This is bad on a laptop because you start with a 1GB download, but you have to deal with multiple intermediary 4GB compressed files, which can take up a lot of space. I was dumb and tried to use bomarchivehelper to extract this file. I had to quit it, and then I was left with 4GB of missing space, because a cached version of an intermediary was still on the system somewhere! Log-out/in and restart did not resolve. Nor was the file in any of the cache or temp folders.

I had the *most* trouble finding it. It turned out the cache was in a folder like:

/users/(me)/documents/download files/.bah668/

Where the original file was in the uplevel download files. This folder was hidden, and du was not able to identify it as part of the contents of Download Files -- and so I had a very hard time finding it! But finally an rm -rf on that folder did the trick.

Just wanted to share!