Trojan?

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evophoto

Registered
My harddrive filled up fom 50 to 80 gigs in 3 days... I emptied out some pictures and cleared up 37 megs space only to watch it fill up again in seconds. My cable modem's pc activity light stays blinking even when the machine is idle and no programs are running.

How can I tell what is eating up all my space?

iMac g4 17 768 megs ram
80g hdd
 
cable modem light blinking is normal not to worry.

you can see what is using space by running OmniDiskSweeper from the omnigroup. (http://www.omnigroup.com) Let it "size" your drive and when it's done you'll have the listing of what's what size wise.
 
ok, I was able to download the program by deleting a 30 meg file and dling the app at that time... when it was done running I noticed a log file in a folder named "private" that is 23 gigs... this can't be normal can it? The file name is system.log , the path to the file is private\var\log\system.log
will I fubar the the system if I trash that file?

any help is appreciated!
 
evophoto said:
will I fubar the the system if I trash that file?
Click to expand...
Short answer - NO

Long answer - If your computer is awake and running in the very early hours of the morning (3:00 to 5:00 A.M.) then the Unix underlying OS X runs the "cron" tasks that clean up these system logs on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

If your computer is not awake and running in those very early morning hours you need to get a utility such as the freeware app Onyx or the somewaht more convenient to use shareware app Cocktail and run it periodically to manually perform those cron tasks as well as clean out the various cache files and other routine maintenance tasks.

If the big log file comes back quickly - that is an indication that an app is mis-behaving and throwing lots of errors. You can look at the content of the log files by opening /Applications/Utilities/Console and seeing if the logs provide a clue to what may be going on.
 
I went to console and it shows this:
Looking for devices matching vendor ID=1193 and product ID=8718
Looking for devices matching vendor ID=1193 and product ID=8717

found out this was my canon scanner... now I need to find out how to mke it stop...

over and over...

How can I get the finder to show hidden files so I can delete that log...
 
I found out (by google) that the offending driver was my Canon scanner driver. I uninstalled it and got the endless looping to stop.

I ended up downloading TinkerTool and showing my hidden files. Then I trashed the log file and now I have my hdd space back.

Is there a way to set a max size (of say 100 megs) on that log file???

Thanks for the help... I learned a lot... if anyone else has any tips... I'm interested.

Now if I can just make Safari run faster.
 
If you have several HD partitions, you could make /var/log a symlink to a folder on another partition. Then the other partition could fill up without crushing your system drive.
 
If you really want to go all out, you can mount a partition at /var/log. :p

There's not any way to limit the file size, unfortunately.

Oh, and some people have gotten Safari to be a bit snappier by deleting the favicon cache every once in a while. They're all held in a bunch of folders in Home -> Library -> Safari -> Icons - you can trash those (you'll lose the favicons, but Safari will rebuild them as you visit sites). Safari, on its own, never deletes these, so the cache can get pretty big, and when there are a lot of them it seems to bog Safari down by a bit.
 
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