On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 07:48:28AM -0500, hadley wickham wrote: > I tried disk inventory x, grandperspectice and omnisweeper - but none > of them found the culprit. Grandperspectice at least reports that > there is 8 gig of space not shown, presumably because the files were > created with some permissions issues. Still trying to hunt them down > :(
It could be that some process has a large file open, where the directory entry has been deleted - the space used by the file itself won't be freed until whatever process has it open has closed it. You may be able to use 'lsof' or 'fuser' to locate the culprit (*) (don't know if OSX has either of those tools). Otherwise, a reboot of the machine is the simplest solution if that's the problem. HTH, Brian. (*) Try 'lsof /' for starters, as root.
