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After noticing a significant decrease in the free space on my MacBook Air (and with only 128GB, every GB counts!) I ran DaisyDisk to find out what was going on and discovered that the ~/Library/Application Support/iPhone Simulator/6.1/tmp directory had 3GB of junk (ghostlyIcons., gridImages., iconImages.*, iconLabels_gray.*) in it!

By the looks of it 3GB is nothing, that folder can rack 50GB with ease!

I assume I can just delete what ever is in there? Shouldn't it get deleted automatically?

mluisbrown
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  • I don't see why this question was closed when a [very similar question](http://stackoverflow.com/q/7279141/368085) has great support. The question is essentially the same, but about a different Xcode development directory which also fills up with junk. – mluisbrown Jun 05 '13 at 12:31
  • Seconding that. I came here to find out the exact same thing. – yjsoon Jun 14 '13 at 12:29
  • @yjsoon thanks. If you are able (I'm not sure what level of rep is required) please vote to reopen the question. Still requires 3 more votes to be reopened. – mluisbrown Jun 14 '13 at 15:43
  • I agree. This should be re-opened. I don't see any way to clear the folder and for me it is several GB. On another dev machine it's only 3MB. – Abhi Beckert Jun 14 '13 at 23:13
  • @AbhiBeckert We're referring to this on the Mac -- is yours on the device itself? Asking because you say you don't see any way to clear it. (Deleting from Finder works fine on the Mac.) – yjsoon Jun 16 '13 at 11:25

1 Answers1

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I ended up deleting most of the files in tmp:

  • The tmp directory name seems to suggest they're deletable.
  • The other simulators (6.0, 5.1) work fine without the large files in their tmp folders.
  • In this tweet from May, jailbreak developer Ryan Petrich suggested deleting those files, and he hasn't followed up since with any issues.
  • He seems to think it's a Springboard bug, and fixes it in this jailbreak tweak.
  • Following the tweet, I only deleted gridImages.*, ghostlyIcons.*, iconImages.*, and iconLabels_gray.*. Left the IconsCache and lsidentifiers plist as they weren't taking up as much space (and existed in the other simulator versions).

FWIW, my simulator is running fine after deleting the files.

yjsoon
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