Run away /var/folders/*

[olcikas_e]

We're having an issue with /var/folders/* just running away and becoming enormous, to the point of filling up the entire drive. On the one computer I have here, if I delete it out I can watch it creating a gig worth of data every 10 seconds or so and the drive just fills back up. Does anyone know what is causing this?

[CasperSally]

We have issues with the folders getting large, but only after dozens of students login to use shared computers.

Apple has us running this script

find /var/folders -name "*.iscachebmp" -type f -exec rm -v "{}" ;

I run it when HD capacity gets over 80% (via smart group). nothing like what you're seeing, though, a gig of data every 10 seconds, but maybe it's somewhat helpful.

[denmoff]

@CasperSally Does running this command require a system restart afterwards? I have been basically running a rm -rf /var/folders/* and then rebooting. Without a reboot, the system seems to act funny. Such as apps having no icon.

[CasperSally]

@denmoff No complaints like that so far, but we're only deleting those cache files so maybe that's why

[alexjdale]

15G used on my desktop, I wasn't even aware of this. What is stored here?

Edit: 19G when I run "du -h /var/folders" with sudo so I can see into every folder...

[olcikas_e]

FYI, the computers work fine during a safe boot (which I had the techs do to clean out these files). I just discovered on some of the computers its filling up within minutes, so just doing an occasionally safe boot to clean house isn't working. While its safe booted though, everything is working perfectly.

[olcikas_e]

We have this problem on most of our computers, but its manageable and I can run the "rm -rf /var/folders" command with a Casper policy.. but in some cases the hard drive is filling back up within minutes.

[Sonic84]

I noticed this on my home Mac before upgrading to Yosemite. /var/folders was getting up to 2 or 3GB. Rebooting pruned these temp files. Upgrading to Yosemite helped also. At the moment it's only 1.8GB.

bash-3.2# du -hcd 0  /var/folders/
1.8G    /var/folders/
1.8G    total
bash-3.2#

[Aaron]

I had a similar issue when our Trend AV was playing up for a particular user - it just kept spamming the logs about a broken module, very VERY quickly. Simply reinstalling it fixed it.

[jacob_salmela]

This post has some information on /var/folders/* but it is from many months ago.

It looks like someone also submitted it as a bug.

I haven't seen this folder grow in size on any of my devices, but by emptying it and rebooting, I was able to fix this error, which is also mentioned in that article.
external image link

[dpertschi]

@jacob_salmela I read through that James Reynolds article, including all the comments.

My take away is that emptying /var/folders/ might not be sufficient, and that recreating a specific folder structure was necessary. http://blog.magnusviri.com/what-is-var-folders.html#comment-1603823690

Did you find that simply emptying /var/folders was adequate?

[jacob_salmela]

@dpertschi So far, yes. I have only had the issue happen half a dozen times. The next time it creeps up, I will see if that specific folder structure does anything different.

[salrin_michael]

Deleting the entire contents of /private/var/folders/ will require a restart and erroneous issues such as printing (kudos to Bobst). Especially if a users is currently logged in. Plus enabling ongoing restarts on labs and laptop carts isn't exactly convenient. Yesterday I found a computer with 120GB in the respective folder. We are currently testing a script that runs and only deletes the previous day's cached folders in /private/var/folders/, thereby removing folders that are not currently in use. If a new user logs in, the tomorrow it will be removed. We are using a Launchd .plist that calls for the .sh the command, we are running the following command < find /private/var/folders/* -type d -mtime 1 -exec rm -r {} ; > Let us know if this command works for you, ANY feedback is welcome!!