Clean Mac Hdd

Clean Mac HDD

Find the space, name the producer of every large folder, then reclaim only what regenerates or leaked. The human decides on everything else.

1. Measure

Read the Data volume, never / — on macOS / is the sealed system snapshot and reports a few GB used:

df -h /System/Volumes/Data

Then size the home folder one level down. A full du over home runs for minutes: run it in the background with a long timeout and keep going.

du -sh ~/* ~/.[!.]* 2>/dev/null | sort -rh | head -25

2. Attribute

Drill into each folder above 1 GB until it is attributed: the tool, app, or script that writes it is named, and the folder falls in one class:

• Regenerable — a cache the producer rebuilds on demand (package caches, build caches, browser caches, simulator runtimes).
• Leak — output the producer should have removed and did not (a temp dir of a killed process, dumps of a runaway loop). A leak has a producer to patch, not only a folder to delete.
• Data — the human's files and app state (messages, media, VM images, models). Report it, leave it.

Check OFFENDERS.md first: it holds the producers already met, their classes, their reclaim commands, and the fix that stops each leak. A folder the catalog lacks gets attributed by hand: recent file dates, pgrep for a running producer, a grep of the user's repos for the tool name.

Two tools mislead here. du reports the allocated size of a sparse file (a Docker disk image, a VM bundle); ls -lh reports the reserved size, and only the allocated one is on disk. And a leak with a live producer is still growing: pgrep -fl <tool> before touching it, and stop or finish the producer first.

Done when every folder above 1 GB carries a producer and a class.

3. Report

Print one table: folder, size, producer, class, planned action. Lead with the total the regenerable and leak rows add up to. Then stop and wait for the user's go-ahead: deletion is irreversible and rm bypasses the Trash.

4. Reclaim

On the go-ahead, in this order:

1. Delete the leaks and patch each producer so it stops leaking (the catalog names the flag or setting).
2. Run each regenerable cache's own clean command from the catalog; use rm -rf only for a cache with no command.
3. Re-read df -h /System/Volumes/Data and report before and after, plus every producer patched.

A new producer met on the way goes into OFFENDERS.md in the same pass, so the next run starts from it.