Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space
-
-
@boomzilla Why did it take you ten days to post after you set the thread's title?
-
@Zecc the disk was full.
-
Interesting, this isn't a problem for windows, it still lets you delete files even when the disk is completely full.
He could have used a liveUSB with actual linux on it and deleted space that way as well and saved himself all of that work.
-
Pure hypothesis, it needs space to move stuff to its equivalent of the recycle bin? Which windows is willing to bypass if you merely hold shift.
-
@PleegWat said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
Pure hypothesis, it needs space to move stuff to its equivalent of the recycle bin? Which windows is willing to bypass if you merely hold shift.
But also it wouldn't let him clean out the recycle bin.
-
@boomzilla Well obviously emptying the recycle bin necessitates creating a time machine snapshot.
-
@PleegWat said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
Pure hypothesis, it needs space to move stuff to its equivalent of the recycle bin? Which windows is willing to bypass if you merely hold shift.
macOS too, if you delete via the File menu in the Finder (rather than by dragging the file or folder to the trash) and keep the Option key pressed, or — if you prefer the keyboard — by pressing Option-Command-Backspace instead of only Command-Backspace. But I gather from the article that it was impossible to delete anything at all, including from the terminal, which was my first thought: just
rm
some stuff to make room. It’s that bit that has me puzzled as to why it wouldn’t work.
-
@PleegWat said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
@boomzilla Well obviously emptying the recycle bin necessitates creating a time machine snapshot.
It would the next time Time Machine fires up. That could be a few seconds after you delete things, but also almost an hour later (since it makes a backup every hour).
-
@boomzilla said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
So much for "Just Works™". Sounds like some special fuckery on behalf of OSX's
rm
, probably something like whattrash
does on GNUix. Of course ifrm
won't work, expectingfind ... -exec rm
to work is a bit dumb;find ... -delete
would have a better chance. I'm too lazy to check my son's half broken Macbook now butENOSPC
is not even a possible error code for Linux'sunlink(2)
.
-
@Dragoon said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
He could have used a liveUSB with actual linux on it and deleted space that way as well and saved himself all of that work.
On an Apple Silicone™ Mac that's probably easier said than done.
-
Quite Possibly, I avoid macs with a passion.
-
@Dragoon said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
I avoid macs with a passion.
What about Macs without passion? With depression? Or bipolar?
-
@loopback0 said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
@Dragoon said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
He could have used a liveUSB with actual linux on it and deleted space that way as well and saved himself all of that work.
On an Apple Silicone™ Mac that's probably easier said than done.
: I'm buying a new laptop. Do you have any recommendations?
: At least 2 cores. Disk must be 2.5in SATA.
: SATA? Why not m.2?
: If it so happens that the OS shits itself, and you want me to pull out any files, that's what kind of dock I have on hand.
-
@acrow it's a recent Macbook. No sort of drive dock is helping even if you've got a soldering iron to hand.
-
@HardwareGeek said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
What about Macs without passion?
Never met one.
-
@LaoC said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
@boomzilla said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
So much for "Just Works™". Sounds like some special fuckery on behalf of OSX's
rm
, probably something like whattrash
does on GNUix. Of course ifrm
won't work, expectingfind ... -exec rm
to work is a bit dumb;find ... -delete
would have a better chance. I'm too lazy to check my son's half broken Macbook now butENOSPC
is not even a possible error code for Linux'sunlink(2)
.https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/System/Conceptual/ManPages_iPhoneOS/man2/unlink.2.html doesn't mention it, but it is probably safest to assume that any syscall can give any error. (Signal handlers can make things tricky, for example.)
-
not long ago, I needed disk space, and the uninstall from a game didn't run because there was no space for some temporary shit
-
@sockpuppet7 said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
not long ago, I needed disk space, and the uninstall from a game didn't run because there was no space for some temporary shit
"Couldn't start uninstaller because not enough space to update installer"
--- Visual Studio installer
-
I had a similar issue once when I was doing home tech visits. A guy's kids had gotten the boot drive of their Windows (XP or 7) computer so full that it wouldn't boot. Thankfully fixing it was as easy as booting from USB and deleting some temp files.
-
@Parody said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
I had a similar issue once when I was doing home tech visits. A guy's kids had gotten the boot drive of their Windows (XP or 7) computer so full that it wouldn't boot. Thankfully fixing it was as easy as booting from USB and deleting some temp files.
My co-worker's ubuntu18 machine won't boot right now because the disk is full.
-
Pretty sure giving your kids a MacBook is classified as child abuse.
-
@HardwareGeek said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
@Dragoon said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
I avoid macs with a passion.
What about Macs without passion? With depression? Or bipolar?
Even though the faces the first Macs made looked sort of bipolar, they used NMOS already.
-
@acrow said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
At least 2 cores.
These days, that's a low bar to pass.
-
@Gurth said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
just rm some stuff to make room. It’s that bit that has me puzzled as to why it wouldn’t work
I'd put money on Time Machine hooking into file deletions from inside the syscall that everything ultimately uses to delete files.
And yes, I agree, that's every bit as stupid as it sounds, because hooking in a layer above what
rm
uses would allowrm
to act as an emergency recovery mechanism.
-
@Steve_The_Cynic does rm not stand for “recovery mechanism”?
-
@Steve_The_Cynic said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
@Gurth said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
just rm some stuff to make room. It’s that bit that has me puzzled as to why it wouldn’t work
I'd put money on Time Machine hooking into file deletions from inside the syscall that everything ultimately uses to delete files.
That or at least a whole load of collusion in the filesystem; Apple has quite a history of doing that. (You can probably sidestep it by setting the right attribute on the file, which is nearly impossible to discover if you don't know exactly what you are looking for...)
-
Seems on Apple forum, they suggest you boot into safe mode in order to delete files if your disk is full.
-
@Steve_The_Cynic said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
@Gurth said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
just rm some stuff to make room. It’s that bit that has me puzzled as to why it wouldn’t work
I'd put money on Time Machine hooking into file deletions from inside the syscall that everything ultimately uses to delete files.
And yes, I agree, that's every bit as stupid as it sounds, because hooking in a layer above what
rm
uses would allowrm
to act as an emergency recovery mechanism.But then users would complain when Time Machine won't fix their scripting oopses. The default terminal would need to have a large banner declaring "TIME MACHINE UNAVAILABLE IN COMMAND LINE". And there would be merging to do with the effects of whatever you do on the command line. And then there's...
A better solution would be to require that there is enough space for Time Machine to work. And if there isn't, put a banner at the top of the screen, saying "TIME MACHINE UNAVAILABLE UNTIL xxxGB FREE SPACE AVAILABLE ON DISK". And, you know, not back up the files the user deletes next. Sure, they'll probably delete something important in panic. But it's on them for not shelling bigger bucks on more Apple-taxed disk space.
-
@acrow said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
But it's on them for not shelling bigger bucks on more Apple-taxed disk space.
See also iCloud.
-
@acrow said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
not back up the files the user deletes next.
Time Machine doesn’t back up files you’ve deleted anyway. It’s not a thing that tries to make backup copies of files you’re deleting in case you decide you need them again, it’s a thing that makes a backup of your entire hard drive(s) every hour (essentially by copying everything that changed and hardlinking to the previous backup for everything that didn’t change).
-
@Gurth Then the fix would be even simpler: Just keep the Time Machine change-log in RAM until there's space to write it on the disk. Instead of refusing to delete files if the operation can't be logged.
-
You can't turn off Time Machine?
-
@acrow said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
@Steve_The_Cynic said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
@Gurth said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
just rm some stuff to make room. It’s that bit that has me puzzled as to why it wouldn’t work
I'd put money on Time Machine hooking into file deletions from inside the syscall that everything ultimately uses to delete files.
And yes, I agree, that's every bit as stupid as it sounds, because hooking in a layer above what
rm
uses would allowrm
to act as an emergency recovery mechanism.But then users would complain when Time Machine won't fix their scripting oopses. The default terminal would need to have a large banner declaring "TIME MACHINE UNAVAILABLE IN COMMAND LINE". And there would be merging to do with the effects of whatever you do on the command line.
This sort of thing has generated multiple blakeyrants, much to everyone's amusement.
-
@Gern_Blaanston said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
You can't turn off Time Machine?
OK, Morlock.
-
@Gern_Blaanston said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
You can't turn off Time Machine?
Of course you can — though, after just checking, I notice it’s not as easy as it used to be. macOS seems to be starting to suffer from Windowsitis in having to go through several menus/windows to get to settings you actually want. The window for it used to look like this:
You got there by clicking on the Time Machine icon in the menu bar and choosing to go to the TM settings. All you needed to do to turn it off would be to uncheck the “Back Up Automatically” box.
Now, though, you still click on those same menu items, which takes you to this screen in the system prefs:
… where you have to click the Options button pointed to by the arrow, which brings up another window with volumes to be excepted from the backup, and a pop-up menu to select when to make backups:
… where you have to choose “Manually” … IMHO, this is not a user-friendly improvement.
-
@dcon said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
@Parody said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
I had a similar issue once when I was doing home tech visits. A guy's kids had gotten the boot drive of their Windows (XP or 7) computer so full that it wouldn't boot. Thankfully fixing it was as easy as booting from USB and deleting some temp files.
My co-worker's ubuntu18 machine won't boot right now because the disk is full.
That's what the single-user mode is for. Linux filesystems reserve the last 5% of their capacity for root, so that should still work—hope he remembers the root password.
-
@Gurth you’re turning TM off? obvs.
-
@Arantor said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
@Gurth you’re turning TM off? obvs.
After the experience a few years ago of both my iMac’s internal hard drive and the external TM one beginning to fail within days of each other, I’m most definitely not turning it off. But the generic you can, if desired.
(The computer suddenly wouldn’t boot from the internal drive anymore and re-installing the OS from the repair partition also went wrong in ways I don’t remember. After installing a new OS on a temporary external drive, I could boot from that. New drive in the computer — always fun with an iMac — then restore from a TM backup back … nope, the hardware of that turned out to also be going to shit :( Luckily, I could still get the data off the internal drive via a USB adapter, to manually copy it back to the replacement drive. And had to buy a new drive for the TM backup.)
-
@Bulb said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
the root password.
Corporate IT doesn't give that out. (It's probably what they use when she went into the office to visit IT)
-
@Bulb said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
That's what the single-user mode is for. Linux filesystems reserve the last 5% of their capacity for root, so that should still work—hope he remembers the root password.
Otherwise there is also
init=/bin/bash
.
-
@Gurth said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
macOS seems to be starting to suffer from Windowsitis in having to go through several menus/windows to get to settings you actually want. The window for it used to look like this:
As opposed to macOSitis where you cannot configure things because Steve Jobs already decided how the perfect computer should operate.
-
I can’t help but wonder if Steve Jobs was fundamentally on to something.
Sure, MacOS isn’t for everyone and it certainly has its share of brain farts but under Jobs it had a direction and an ethos and would rather try to please some of the people all of the time, rather than all of the people some of the time.
Compare and contrast with Windows that doesn’t even manage “some of the time” and can’t even actually fully refit its own administrative area with its new UI styling in the nearly 9 years since launch.
I continue to be sad that Commodore shat the bed as hard as they did in the 90s because there was a general level of sanity and grown up attitude to Workbench and AmigaOS there isn’t today.
Also, I’ve seen several people post screenshots of SPARC stuff on QEMU lately and that also seems perfectly cromulent.
How do we stop the enshittification??
-
@Arantor said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
How do we stop the enshittification??
Are we allowed to think beyond the annoying limitations imposed by law?
-
@Zerosquare “Think different.”
-
@Arantor said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
How do we stop the enshittification??
It's easy! You start up a rival service, which is exactly like the other service before it started going to shit! And then you fight off the design patent wars, and the original company will probably be a bit miffed that you're calling yourselves by their name, so there might be a few more lawsuits.
Once you've
settled the lawsuits murdered their lawyers and leadershipgotten past that trouble, you'll clearly be rolling in cash, because the original form of that service was perfectly profitable before it tried to squeeze out more mone... oh, I'm sorry, I can't keep a straight face anymore. It seems a lot like if you make a good service, then either a bunch of competitors, a market hiccup, the fundamental unprofitability of your service, or getting acquired by assholes is going to force you to enshittificate.
-
@PotatoEngineer The problem is keeping sufficient creative control that you produce something actually good while getting enough money to grow large enough to make a difference for many. Modern investors tend to prefer paperclip maximisers, no matter how dumb that turns out to be.
-
@dkf said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
Modern investors tend to prefer paperclip maximisers
-
@Arantor said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
Compare and contrast with Windows ..... can’t even actually fully refit its own administrative area with its new UI styling in the nearly 9 years since launch.
I agree that it is stupid that there are somethings in the new "Settings" and some things only accessible via the old-fashioned "Control Panel".
But this has accidentally turned out to be a good thing because the "old" UI is just fine and the "new" UI is shit.
-
@Gern_Blaanston said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
@Arantor said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
Compare and contrast with Windows ..... can’t even actually fully refit its own administrative area with its new UI styling in the nearly 9 years since launch.
I agree that it is stupid that there are somethings in the new "Settings" and some things only accessible via the old-fashioned "Control Panel".
But this has accidentally turned out to be a good thing because the "old" UI is just fine and the "new" UI is shit.
I'm rather surprised Microsoft didn't try to do some wanko embedding shit.
Or! Translate the runner and hook all the calls for controls and translate them into the Modern UI equivalents!
Now there's a thought...