Show All Hidden Files on Mac OS X & Find Large Files

Just a short ‘note to self’, because I can never remember how to do this or this command:

I recently had an issue where the available disk space on my Mac-mini ran way too low, and I couldn’t for the life of me find out what was consuming all that space, I shunted all VMs to an external disk but this didn’t really help me that much, so I went on a mission to find these large files and deal with them! 🙂

When using something like the excellent Resilio Sync Pro you may find, like I did, your system disk has filled up with files you don’t seem to be able to find.

In the case of Resilio, it creates an archive directory providing un-delete options, while useful, it meant I had nearly 200GB of wasted space on my already limited system disk that was consumed with files I had deleted.

Unfortunately, these files were hidden so I had no idea they existed.

In order to see hidden system files you will need to run the following command:

‘defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles YES‘

You will now probably need to also ‘relaunch’ the Finder session, you can do this by holding down the ALT key and right clicking the mouse, you will now see the ‘relaunch’ option in the menu, this kind of resets the Finder view.

Once run, you will see all those hidden system files, meaning damage can be done, so I urge caution, and in fact, I recommend you turn it off again when done, just to be on the safe side.

You can do this by running the same command from a terminal window, replacing the ‘YES’ with a ‘NO’ at the end:

‘defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles NO‘

Now to find those pesky large files that are filling up your prescious disk space:

1. Click the Finder icon in the Dock.
2. Choose Go > Home or press Shift-Command (⌘)–H.
3. Choose File > Find or press Command (⌘)–F.
4. Open the Kind pop-up menu, then choose Other.
5. Under “Select a search attribute” select the checkbox for File Size. Make sure no other checkboxes are selected, then click OK.
6. Change the “equals” pop-up menu to “is greater than,” then change the “KB” pop-up menu to “MB.”
7. Enter a minimum file size. 100 MB is a good starting point. You can change the value to see more or fewer results.

Searching begins as soon as you type a file size. It may take a moment for all the search results to appear.

The above bullets came from the apple support website and part of a larger article describing how to increase your disk size > OS X Mavericks: Increase disk space