Mac storage and files question (desktop, hd, Unix, screen)

[Oakley7677]

I have a macbook air with a 128gb hard drive. I have filled it up a few times, and constantly have to transfer files to an external hard drive. When I looked at the HD in "about this mac", it shows that 64gb is taken up by "other":

[IMG][/IMG]

When I go to finder to try to figure out which files are taking up the space, it doesn't show how big each folder is:

[IMG][/IMG]

So, how do I figure out what is taking up all the space in "other", and how do I get rid of it?

Thanks

[skinsguy37]

Well, 64GB is too big to assume it's the recovery drive. You might want to consider looking at something like "CleanMyMac 3". It will do a thorough scan of your Mac and will show you all files that are on it. My wife uses it on her work computer, and I tried it on my Macbook at home, and it did its job.

[thelopez2]

Right click / secondary click / two finger click on the folder and click get info

[sgorneau]

Make sure the Finder is your active application (i.e. the Finder menu is at the top of your screen), Go to View > Show View Options (⌘J). In the bottom section of options at the bottom of the Desktop palette, check "Calculate all sizes". Then click the "Use as defaults" button to apply system wide.

Now in any Finder window (List and Coverflow views) you will see directory sizes.

[stanley-88888888]

since macs are bsdi unix, something like this should work:

[stanley-88888888@hyper ~]$ cat bin/space.ksh
#!/bin/bash

dir=$1

sudo find $dir -type f -printf "%s \t\t%p\n" | sort -nr > ~/file-sizes.txt
sudo find $dir -type d -exec du -b -d 0 -S '{}' \; | sort -nr > ~/dir-sizes.txt

#df -h

caveat: sometimes apple removes some command-line programs from mac so ymmv.

[NHDave]

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202867

Have you considered a larger SSD?

[RayinAK]

For individual files in a folder: under the Finder, open the folder, click on the file to (select it) highlight it, then go to the File menu on to of the screen, and down the list to Get Information. That will show you the size of that file.

To find the size of the whole folder (under the Finder again): click on the folder, and then Get Information.