use Perl

In the past few weeks, I've made a lot of room on my PowerBook's 60-but-really-55 GB hard drive.

First, I removed old fink stuff from /sw. I kept bin, etc, include, lib, sbin, share, var. But I removed the fink and src subdirectories, which was together about 1.1GB. I also removed fink from my environment; I'll give it a month or two to make sure I don't need it, then delete the rest (and maybe move anything I do need to /usr/local first). That will get me another 1.25GB.

Next, I added an external hard drive to my home studio, 160GB. I pretty much will do my music and video production in that room, so I can move a lot of files to that drive.

First, I moved all my music files for Logic and GarageBand over there, about 4GB worth.

Then I moved my Apple Loops, over 6GB worth. In the process, I discovered "Apple Loops for GarageBand" were installed in two different locations, in /Library/Application Support/GarageBand/ and /Library/Audio/, to the tune of 1GB. I also had some loops in ~/Library/Audio/. I consolidated all these loops into one folder in the external drive, deleted the loops index files, and then reimported them into GarageBand, where I was prompted to leave them there or copy them. I left them there, it created my new index files, and all was well.

Then I did similar things with other GB and Logic files. GB instruments take up 2.1 GB; Logic's samples (instruments, drums, and reverbs) take up 4.2GB. I could not find a way to tell Logic and GB to look elsewhere, so I just made symlinks. I also moved the GarageBand Demo Songs, 400MB.

Finally, I put the iDVD themes (also in /Library/Application Support/) to the drive, and told iDVD in its prefs to look there for my themes. 1.7GB.

Along the way, I also removed things like the iWork and iDVD tutorials, for another half-GB or so.

So we're talking about 20GB saved, off a 55GB drive. Not too shabby. Now time to fill it up again!