ls -la won’t help you for directories, which is what .app bundles are. You can use the du command on those.
If you’re in /Applications, you can do:
du -cs * | sort -n
That will list all the folders/apps, sorted in increasing order of size (in bytes).
Cool, thanks.
ls -la did give me a detailed listing, but I can’t see where it says the file size. Is there a way to scroll back up to see what each column means?
Anyway, now I got rid of Quicktime too.
Unfortunately, upon reboot, I’m getting the same error. Despite all that, my startup disc is apparently still full. I guess I need to go nuke some more files, eh?
Apparently this episode is a ‘to be continued’. It’s nearly 4am and I could be seriously getting close to the point where that whole rm -r/* typo could become a reality.
Thanks again.
That did it. Many thanks.
Guess sleep just isn’t in the cards tonight…
Deleted Skype. Rebooting now… Fingers crossed.
ETA: 
:)
Thanks guys!
Now on to ‘‘The Big Cleanup’’. Wish me luck… 
This program is good for showing you where all your disk space is. I don’t know what the hard numbers are, but I’d keep at least 10 GB free on my Mac startup disk to keep it running smoothly. I’ve heard the number given as 10% of your disk space should always be free, but 30GB for you sounds like more than is necessary.
Ahh, feels good to be posting from the comfort of my own computer again!
Turns out the major problem was from my ‘Mail’ program. It had a folder called ‘Recovery’. No idea how it got there, but apparently it’s been there awhile, just saving old emails that, for whatever reason, I decided not to send. This included many emails which had attachments too large to be sent and thus, weren’t. Once I deleted this folder, a whopping 4 gigs suddenly reappeared!
Stupid mail.
Anyway, just downloaded OmniDiskSweeper. Far too tired to test it now, but I’ll give it a shot tomorrow. I have about 5 gigs free right now and, while that’s not near enough, it will at least ensure I’ll be able to start up my computer in the morning.
Gah, what an aggravating night. Thank science for the Dope.
Try this:Grand Perspective.
You’ll be amazed.
Yup. Color me amazed. This program makes my head spin… in an oddly fascinating way.
I´ve been having start up problems with my 2007 macbook pro (OSx 10.4.7) and I stumbled upon this thread while trying to figure it out. This seemed really helpful, and I successfully deleted Skype using the single user instructions from Beowolf thinking maybe that would do the trick for me but it didn´t work. I´m wondering if anyone is still on this thread to possibly help me figure out what happened to my computer??
Briefly: My computer was giving me start up disk almost full warnings about a month ago, but I bought an external harddrive and freed up a lot of space. More recently, I moved to Chile, where I´ve been taking a lot of pictures, and probably slowly filling up my computer again - but I haven´t been given a start up disk almost full warning again - then last night I used my computer briefly to try to check some emails, the internet wasn´t connecting (ethernet cord, seemed to be problems with the connection in all of Punta Arenas) so I shut down my computer and went to bed. This morning I tried to turn the computer on, and it appeared to be starting up normally right through the apple window with the blue bar loading underneith it, but then stops at a blue screen, with the cursor showing, and doesn´t go any further.
Any ideas?? I can offer more details probably but figured I´d see if anyone replies to this before I go off typing any more…
It might have been better to start a new thread…
Anyway, there are a few things you can do:
beowulff’s reply is spot on. Reboot the machine in this order:
Boot it and immediately hold down the command key and the s key.
As soon as white type on a black background appears, release the Command key and s key. (All the typing you do, including the startup with the command and s keys held down is lower case.)
You’re looking for the # to appear within the last line of type (I don’t recall what else the last line says, but it’s obvious a prompt to type in a command).
It may take a few seconds for the line of type with the # to appear; the flow of type may appear to stall before the # appears, but the type will resume its flow and the line of type with the # will appear soon after.
When the line of type with the # shows up, type (including spaces)
fsck -fy
Then hit the return key.
If, after the computer does its stuff it says “Files have been modifed, the system appears to be OK,” or words to that effect, run fsck -fy again.
If all it says is “The system files appear to be OK,” or words to that effect and without “Files have been modified,” type “reboot” without the quotes. The machine will restart normally.
Áwesome thanks for the tips - I just booted it up in safe mode and it got me to the finder. As far as I can tell, I have plenty of space available… but I might not be looking in the right place. When I double click on the harddrive icon, the finder window that opens says 24.2 gigabites available. I also opened system preferences - start up disk, and noticed I have two options for start up: on the harddrive or a network startup, Í´ve never seen this window before but I have it set to start up on the harddrive - does this mean anything?
I guess now my question is, what can I do to figure out why it wasn´t starting before, and get it to boot up in regular mode?
I have to leave the computer for a couple of hours right now, but I figue I´d leave a few questions heres while I´m thinking of them. My mac is from 2007 and running OS X 10.4.11, and it has been a pain not being able to sync my iPhone 4s with my iTunes, or use photo stream with iPhoto, basically just not being able to use all programs and apps that are designed for newer operating systems. Is it possible to upgrade to a new operating system with my computer? And if not, what can I do to clean it out and get it running as close to like new as possible? Anything?
Thanks very much for any ideas!
A 2007 MacBook should be able to be upgraded to 10.7, and maybe 10.8 (it depends on the exact configuration). If you do this, remember that 10.7 drops support for PPC apps (notably Quicken). Before you upgrade, make sure that none of your critical apps are PPC-only. Here is a nice article about the issue: Preparing for Lion: Find Your PowerPC Applications - TidBITS
Seeing how old this post is, I was debating whether to reply or post a new one. Happy to see that Beowulff is still active on this board because this is the best of the dozens of articles and forum posts I’ve read and I’m hoping you can help me out of the hole I’ve dug for myself. I have the same issue, but can’t get the drive to mount.
when I try the /sbin/mount -uw / command, I get a lengthly slap on the wrist that ends in:
“…
mount_hfs: error on mount(): error = -1
mount_hfs: invalid argument”
I’ve tried to just go and delete the files with rm [/path/file]. even tried a few variants of it that I found on other message boards, but everything gets blocked with some variant of a “you can’t do crap to this volume because it’s read only–you stupid digital hoarder”
I can use cd and ls to navigate through the directories and see what’s there, it just won’t let me delete anything.
I have about the same technical ability as A Spoonful of Awesome (though not the same wit!). So I’ll gladly follow any direction you can give. Waiting with bated breath…
Did you run fsck first?
That may or not may not help.
With errors, it is always important to look at the first line, not the last. That is usually where the problem lies. The last line is usually just another symptom.
You could be running into issues with the new SIP (system integrity protection) but I doubt that. You can’t touch certain protected files anymore, but you should not be trying anyway.
MartyNYC -
I have (luckily for me, not so good for you) never come across this issue personally.
A quick Google search doesn’t turn up anything definitive.
The problem seems to be that since you can’t mount the volume as writable, you can’t do anything with it. If this was happening to me, I would do the “Firewire Target Mode” thing and try to repair it remotely.
Also, DiskWarrior has been updated in the 6 years since this thread was started, and trying that would be worth a shot.
Do you have access to another, working, Mac?
Thank you both for the quick replies.
Beowulff: I have tried a Target drive/firewire hookup to my working MacBook Air - can’t seem to access the drive at all that way. Might be time to try Disk Warrior, but if it’s just a question of figuring out how to dele a few files, I’d rather keep the $100 in my pocket unless I know it will work for sure.
Francis Vaughan:
More details on the error code - I booted again in Single User Mode and here’s what I got:
when I ran /sbin/fsck -fy (twice) it said:
…
[I know what you said about the last few lines, but everything above this was normal, e.g. **Checking catalog hierarchy.]
…
** The volume Macintosh HD appears to be OK
disk0s2: I/O error.
***** The volume was modified *****
Then I ran /sbin/mount -uw / and got:
jnl: disk0s2:: replay_journal: from 12006400 to: 14425600 (offset 0x502000)
disk0s2: I/O error.
jnl: disk0s2: update-fs-block: failed to update block 2 (ret5)
jnl: disk0s2: journal_open: Error replaying the journal!
hfs_mount: journal_open == NULL; couldn’t be opened on Macintosh HD
mount_hfs: error on mount(): error = -1
mount_hfs: Invalid argument
Uh Oh.
This is very bad:
disk0s2: I/O error.
This means (99% of the time) that your hard drive has some serious failure, generally bad blocks due to a head crash.
If this was my machine, I would take the drive out, attach it to a working machine with an external SATA interface, copy what I could off of it, and then hit it with a large hammer and toss it.
Yup. Disk is failing.
Do not attempt any more repairs with it - rule 1 is that attempts to repair file systems on a failing disk only make things worse. Get the data you can off, and toss it.
As beowulf says, the easiest thing is to put the disk in an external case (dirt cheap if you don’t already have one) and attach it to a working machine. A working machine could be your current Mac with a new drive and new installation of the OS (in which case Migration Assistant might be a good tool to use to get your data off.)
Good opportunity to replace the disk with a SSD anyway.
With luck you have backups - so it may be you don’t actually care about the contents of the failed disk.