I sat down at my newish PowerMac this morning to do some hacking. I bought it in January 2006. It has a 149GB hard drive which is now full. My wife complained about iMovie HD being a little slow, which should have been a warning sign. Anyway time to dust off my old script to find the large files on the computer. I initially forgot I had such a script. I googled for something to grab and did not find much. So I will put this on my blog in the hope the next time I am looking for it it will be easier to find.
I am thinking about writing a Dashboard widget to do this. I wrote my first widget last night. It embeds a DOJO widget. Very nice and easy, with a few gotchas not covered in the documentation. I will blog about that another time. Why write a widget to execute a simple script? I am realising that there is a growing group of Mac power users who have not discovered the joy of Unix, and are probably unlikely to.
find . -type f -size +500000c -exec ls -ldh {} ; 2>/dev/null
The script above find all files from the directory you are in down of size greater than 500,000 bytes. Change the number up and down as desired. You will need to be root to find all files on the system. On Mac OS X it is a good idea to start at /Users, which is where most of the stuff you might want to delete will be.
And what you might be wondering did I find. We bought a Sony HDR-HC3 High Definition wide screen camcorder a few months back and have been shooting hi-def movies ever since, along with 4MB photos. Even word 2 pdf conversion may come in handy in some situations.
