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2020-3-30 Yes, it is safe. That said, don't just delete all the contents of your cache folder without reason. It can be beneficial to clear out those taking up the significant space in your /Library/Caches/ if you need to free some up, but you really shouldn't clear any contents of your /System/Caches unless there is a problem. As would be expected, you will find that the programs you access most often. How to delete a file that macOS says is in use There’s an override for files you can’t delete, but take care.
If you add 'limit coredumpsize 0' into your ~/.tcshrc or ~/.cshrc file, it should eliminate those files
If you want to have the core files for debug purposes, I'd rather delete them with this command in the crontab:
/usr/bin/find -name /cores/core.* -ctime 1 -delete
This only deletes core files older than 24 hours.
Um, either you or some other program must have turned that on. Apple's default is for core dumps to be limited to 0 bytes, which means you should have none. What were the dumps for?
I'm the author of this 'hint'. I have no idea on what these were for. Have you an idea on how to turn this feature off? I don't remember having turned it on any time, but i try many utilities, so i might have done that by accident. It happened again, though since i deleted that gigabyte.
Ya, I didn't have any at all, and I do recall reading or seeing somewhere that cores were supposed to be eliminated by default with the OS install. I'm not sure how they would get turned on by accident, but on two machines I found none at all.
I found nothing in my cores directory. Seems to be empty. I'll take that as a good sign, although I'm always looking for ways to gain more HD space..
You can check your current limits with the 'ulimit -a' command in bash (type 'help ulimit' for more info) or the 'limit' command in tcsh.
The core should be zero. I did some basic hunting and didn't find any obvious setting in /etc, although you could also check the files /etc/csh.* or /etc/profile* and /etc/bashrc to see if there is a limit command in there that something or someone put in.
The place to look for is in /etc/rc.common, at the end of the file, here's the relevant snip :
# Enable coredumps if requested.
##
if [ '${COREDUMPS:=-NO-}' = '-YES-' ]; then
ulimit -c unlimited
fi
To make sure there is nothing wrong with your defaults you should grep all files involved in startup (etc/rc*, StartUpItems..) for ulimit.
My /cores directory was completely empty and I like it that way :-)
Wow, I don't know how this escaped my 'grepping' :)
Anyway, just to complete the thought for those that don't like tinkering that much, placing this line in your /etc/hostconfig file will **enable** core dumps:
COREDUMPS=-YES-
Make sure it's either not there (the default) or is set to -NO- if you don't want them.
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One file, hidden (named with . previous to characters) and less than 4K in size. Good spot to watch, and investigate for missing space, but not applicable here.
Personally, my big drive-eater is all the legacy apps and OS versions I've been maintaining on my system until recently. Three partitions on my OEM drive ate up 10 GB of space for old proggies and systems. I've recently used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone those to disc images on my new Maxtor (for back-up purposes, in case I actually need something) and re-formatted the whole thing.
<sarcasm>That gave me lots of space back.</sarcasm>
<brag>Now I honestly don't know what I'm going to do with the 30 GB of space free on my OEM drive. I've got that in addition to ~40 GB free space on my new Maxtor, and am sure I'll fill it up soon but *hate* to think of that much junk. And it's always junk.</brag>
'In my case, about 30 files of weights ranging from 30 to 70Mb were present.'
Thirty core files? Bud, you've got some significant issues.
Kinda reminds me of Nero fiddling while Rome burned.
--Richard
I found my cores file empy, but I found another hidden file
at /private/cores.. what is this file for?
It has two files in it called 'cores.199' and 'cores.200' date from 5/2002 and 6/2002.
BF
Well, I found 30 some files at 2.42 Gb. For some reason, removing them restored slightly over 3 Gb to my system.
This is something I'll be keeping an eye on in the future.
Hi:
Just came across your post about core files. I'm learning about them as well in my Unix book for OS 10 by Dave Taylor. I did a find for all my core files and found these:
/Applications/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.debug.core
/Applications/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.jdt.core
/Applications/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.pde.core
/Applications/eclipse/p2/org.eclipse.equinox.p2.core
/Users/chrislandalusa/Documents/workspace/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.resources/.projects/Chapter03_Listing01/org.eclipse.jdt.core
/Users/chrislandalusa/Documents/workspace/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.resources/.projects/first project/org.eclipse.jdt.core
/Users/chrislandalusa/Documents/workspace/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.resources/.projects/ShowAFrame.java/org.eclipse.jdt.core
/Users/chrislandalusa/Documents/workspace/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.debug.core
/Users/chrislandalusa/Documents/workspace/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.jdt.core
/Users/chrislandalusa/Documents/workspace/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.mylyn.bugzilla.core
/Users/chrislandalusa/Documents/workspace/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.team.cvs.core
/Volumes/WINDOWS/Documents and Settings/Chris/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.jdt.core
/Volumes/WINDOWS/Documents and Settings/Chris/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.debug.core
I don't think, given the locations, that theses are core files from a crashed program (unless I'm reading them wrong). Are they? or are they files for my eclipse application that also have a .core extension?
I went to the /core folder on my mac and found nothing there.