The quick bit.
Restart, then find and remove console.log
Details:
A few strange things starting happening with my imac today:
- Search button stopped working in firefox
- Itunes started throwing an error saying it couldn’t save the library
- Iphone wouldn’t back up
Itunes was saying the hard drive was full. But that couldn’t be! I’ve got 250GB of space. Or could it…
Checked the drive info for the hard drive and sure enough 240GB was full.
Checked what I thought would be the worst culprits. My business files, photos and music but these were all within 50GB.
Hmm, tried a systematic search of the hard drive and eventually narrowed it down to console.log A single file that was 165GB!!
Did some internet snooping and it turns out this is just an error log generated by OS X. Somethings throwing a ridiculous amount of errors to run to 165GB but didn’t want to try to open the file as knew with such a large file it would take ages.
Tried to delete the file but as it was still in use I couldn’t. Had to reboot the machine to get it to start a new log file. Then deleted the big one.
Not sure what caused it yet. Could be spotify, itunes, openoffice, aptana or gimp. I’ll keep an eye on the log file for now for clues.