/var/folders – are you kidding me?

Posted in software | Tuesday, April 14th, 2009 | 3 Comments » Trackback

My friend Steve just asked me about /var/folders on Mac OS X. I had never heard of it. But guess what? It’s a freaking caches of all kinds of shit, including screen shots of every web page you’ve ever been to in Safari.

It’s outside your home directory. Even if you have FileVault turned on. If you turn private browsing on, it seems like stuff is NOT written there, but I’m not 100% sure of that yet.

What the hell, Apple? That’s Microsoft-style security. ALL USER SHIT GOES IN THE USER HOME DIRECTORY. Dammit.

Guess what I’m adding to my boot script?

rm -rf /var/folders/*

3 Responses to “/var/folders – are you kidding me?”

  1. julie Says:
    April 15th, 2009 at 4:37 pm

    So wanna know what crappy solution I have for this? My Macbook is single user.

    cd /var
    sudo mv folders crap
    sudo rm -rf crap/*
    mkdir ~/.folders
    sudo ln -s ~/folders folders

    Gross! but now the crap is in my own user folder and can be file-vaulted and such

  2. julie Says:
    April 15th, 2009 at 4:42 pm

    Wait, is this better?

    newfs_hfs /dev/disk2
    Initialized /dev/rdisk2 as a 1024 MB HFS Plus volume

    mkdir /tmp/ramdisk1

    mount -t hfs /dev/disk2 /tmp/ramdisk1

    sudo rm -rf /var/folders
    sudo ln -s /tmp/ramdisk1/ /var/folder

  3. billo Says:
    April 16th, 2009 at 7:18 am

    The second one might be better, definitely for multi-user systems. I guess you’d want to clear the ramdisk on logout somehow.