Clearing System Storage Tutorial
One way to clear some space on your mac using terminal and the du command. It's to help with finding what is taking up the "Other" space in your storage.
Here's a written description of what I do in the video:
If you're comfortable with terminal, you can use the du command to try to find where all that stuff is and decide if you want it or not. I had like 400 gigs of System space and did this to find out about 200 of it was old blockchain stuff I could clear out and the other 200 is applications installed in the system-wide apps folder instead of my user apps folder, which I'm fine with.
To do it
1) Open terminal (cmd + space, start typing terminal)
2) Once in there enter these commands
cd /
sudo du -sh */
3) You'll have to enter your password for sudo to work, so normally think carefully about whether you want to give admin privileges to whatever you're doing--in this case it's du, which is the built in mac disk utility command so it's fine. Look for any folders output here that have a large size, in the tens or hundreds of gigs. For whichever one looks suspiciously large, enter these commands
cd FolderName
sudo du -sh */
4) FolderName is to be replaced by the actual folder name you think is too big. This will output folders/files but now inside the latest folder you cd'd into. Keep repeating this till you've found what is taking up the space and you're fine with it, or until you see a folder name or a file that you know you don't need. In the latter case, enter this command (And don't do this on a folder you're not sure about! Like don't do it on a folder with a general sounding name like Applications or System or whatever. Deleting an important folder shouldn't work without sudo, so just don't ever prefix the following command with sudo)
rm -rf folderOrFileName
folderOrFileName is to be replaced with the actual name of the file or folder you're trying to delete. Be careful with the rm -rf, and make sure you're only doing that on stuff you know you want to delete. You can't easily recover anything you don't mean to delete in this way.