If you see funny behavior on your account, it might be that you are running out of disk space.
A good citizen might do the following every few months, but that ain’t me babe.
The command : quota will tell you how close you are to your quota.
If you are close (or over!!!), then it’s probably junk files doing it, which can safely be trashed.
But how to find the culprits? How to separate the chaff from the wheat?
(See update at bottom for some of Bruce’s tips on how to find offending files,
but immediately below this line are Joel’s less sophisticated directions.)
du -ak | sort -n | tail will give you a list of the biggest dozen or so files. That, of
course, doesn’t necessarily mean they are trash. But common places
with lots of trash are (in my experience)
<your home directory>.Mathematica/Paclets/Temporary (note the dot before Mathematica!) This often has enormous garbage there. Clear out any contents (but
probably not the directory “Temporary” itself.). I had the courage to byte
this bullet after reading
https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/64130/mathematica-appdata-folder-is-taking-up-too-much-space
Note that the comment there also makes the reasonable statement that
the contents of any directory called Temporary or the like are fair game!
<your home directory>.mozilla/firefox will have one or more directories with gibberish names.
(note the dot before mozilla!)
If there is more than one, than trash all but the newest.
For me at least, even in the newest, I had a cache2 directory whose enormous contents I
trashed. I also googled how to force firefox to automatically clear its cache
whenever firefox is logged out so that this garbage doesn’t accumulate!
Here are Bruce’s more sophisticated directions from an email on July 15, 2024: