Apple Users,
I wanted to document a major problem that I found with my macs which might save you from my recent pain. I have a G5 desktop and G4 laptop, each running OS 10.3.9, and graphic aps like Adobe CS and final cut pro.
I started getting startup disk full error messages and began deleting files. Each time I freed up space, the space slowly (minutes to days) become consumed, and I would get startup disk full messages again. I downloaded the program whatsize, but this only examined the first 20GB until a license was purchased. I did find some final cut pro render files I didn’t know about, but soon this space was also gone. It was like I had a virus consuming my disk space. It got so bad that I had no space and my systems started to collapse and corrupt my open word documents, which I tried to save.
After purchasing the full license of whatsize, I found the trouble folder.
private/var/tmp
This folder was hidden, so I had to download the program tinkertool to view the hidden files. Both tinkertool and whatsize worked great.
What I found was over 100,000 files, each 344KB in size totaling 34GB on both my laptop and desktop. The files have a filename like:
4856a2215125b
and opened in textedit.
The files started with:
*PPD-Adobe: "4.3"
*%Auto Generated PPD from Tioga workset
*FormatVersion: "4.3"
*FileVersion: "1.0"
*LanguageEncoding: UTF-8
*LanguageVersion: English
*PCFileName: "AutoMake.PPD"
*Manufacturer: "Canon"
*Product: "(Canon iP5200)"
*LanguageLevel: "3"
*PSVersion: "(3011.104) 0"
*ModelName: "Canon iP5200"
*ShortNickName: "Canon IJ Printer"
*NickName: "Canon iP5200"
*cupsVersion: 1.1
*cupsManualCopies: True
*cupsFilter: "application/pdf 0 /System/Library/Printers/Libraries/PrintJobMgr/Contents/MacOS/PrintJobMgr"
Deleting the 100,000 files was difficult. I found it best to select about 10,000 at a time, (8000 on the G4) and use the shortcut key (apple delete) to move them to the trash. The shortcut key is important because the size of the files make the system behave poorly; once it performed the 'open with' rather than 'more to trash', as such I had 10,000 files begin to open in textedit!
It took about a full day to delete the files, and I have already found that a couple have started to reappear, so I will have to keep an eye on things.
From what I can find on the internet, the PrintJobMgr generates these files but I can’t find any reason. My print queues are clean.
It would have been easy to give up. Once the disk is full, an inexperienced user would not be able to recover. I hate to think what my 81 year old Dad would have done.
I hope a fix is provided in 10.4+ but I hate to upgrade operating systems in the middle of Final Cut Pro projects. I was hoping for stability, but it certainly isn’t there in 10.3.9.
I have to say, if this was on Windows it would be classified as a virus. From what I’ve been through, even unintentional (hopefully), I think Mac has a very bad cold.
Regards, John
I wanted to document a major problem that I found with my macs which might save you from my recent pain. I have a G5 desktop and G4 laptop, each running OS 10.3.9, and graphic aps like Adobe CS and final cut pro.
I started getting startup disk full error messages and began deleting files. Each time I freed up space, the space slowly (minutes to days) become consumed, and I would get startup disk full messages again. I downloaded the program whatsize, but this only examined the first 20GB until a license was purchased. I did find some final cut pro render files I didn’t know about, but soon this space was also gone. It was like I had a virus consuming my disk space. It got so bad that I had no space and my systems started to collapse and corrupt my open word documents, which I tried to save.
After purchasing the full license of whatsize, I found the trouble folder.
private/var/tmp
This folder was hidden, so I had to download the program tinkertool to view the hidden files. Both tinkertool and whatsize worked great.
What I found was over 100,000 files, each 344KB in size totaling 34GB on both my laptop and desktop. The files have a filename like:
4856a2215125b
and opened in textedit.
The files started with:
*PPD-Adobe: "4.3"
*%Auto Generated PPD from Tioga workset
*FormatVersion: "4.3"
*FileVersion: "1.0"
*LanguageEncoding: UTF-8
*LanguageVersion: English
*PCFileName: "AutoMake.PPD"
*Manufacturer: "Canon"
*Product: "(Canon iP5200)"
*LanguageLevel: "3"
*PSVersion: "(3011.104) 0"
*ModelName: "Canon iP5200"
*ShortNickName: "Canon IJ Printer"
*NickName: "Canon iP5200"
*cupsVersion: 1.1
*cupsManualCopies: True
*cupsFilter: "application/pdf 0 /System/Library/Printers/Libraries/PrintJobMgr/Contents/MacOS/PrintJobMgr"
Deleting the 100,000 files was difficult. I found it best to select about 10,000 at a time, (8000 on the G4) and use the shortcut key (apple delete) to move them to the trash. The shortcut key is important because the size of the files make the system behave poorly; once it performed the 'open with' rather than 'more to trash', as such I had 10,000 files begin to open in textedit!
It took about a full day to delete the files, and I have already found that a couple have started to reappear, so I will have to keep an eye on things.
From what I can find on the internet, the PrintJobMgr generates these files but I can’t find any reason. My print queues are clean.
It would have been easy to give up. Once the disk is full, an inexperienced user would not be able to recover. I hate to think what my 81 year old Dad would have done.
I hope a fix is provided in 10.4+ but I hate to upgrade operating systems in the middle of Final Cut Pro projects. I was hoping for stability, but it certainly isn’t there in 10.3.9.
I have to say, if this was on Windows it would be classified as a virus. From what I’ve been through, even unintentional (hopefully), I think Mac has a very bad cold.
Regards, John
