I've upgraded my MacBook Pro to El Capitan recently, and one of the first unpleasant changes, other than XtraFinder & TotalTerminal no longer being compatible, is that the system deems it appropriate to make /private/var/folders
to consume up to and beyond 30–40 GB of space, causing my Mac to slow down tremendously. I understand that the files within this folder are all cache files. My only question is why this is happening, and what makes this happen? Is there any way to make it only cache apps that are actually open, or do I have to refresh my NVRAM/PRAM? It's exceedingly annoying to have my computer act like its trying to buffer 20 gigabytes all at once.
MacOS – El Capitan /private/var/folders cache files consuming 30–40 GB
disk-spacemacbook promacosnvram
Best Answer
The answer is that yes, you are allowed to delete files from
/private/var/folders/
. The commandwas able to work and no crashes came of it. Some errors were issued by the command, but no errors came from the system as a whole. I might issue a new post later on when I know more about this to understand what Apple did with El Capitan to make it act this way.
Here's a thread from the Apple website about this; it agrees that deleting tr should be safe. According to the thread, /var/folders is the new location of caches, which you can safely delete if you've closed all running apps.