Disk cleanup trick for Macs

We had a Macbook in for repair where the hard drive was essentially full.  Even after clearing the browser's cache, there was not really enough free space to do much.

Following these instructions cleared up almost a GB, which the allowed us to install/run other utilities.

Delete user caches on a Mac manually

User cache makes up the majority of Mac junk on your system. A good user cache cleaning could free up gigabytes of free space and speed up your Mac in the process.

To clear your user cache, do the following:

1. Open a Finder window and select “Go to Folder” in the Go menu.

2. Type in ~/Library/Caches and hit enter to proceed to this folder.

Optional step: You can highlight and copy everything to a different folder just in case something goes wrong.

3. Go into each of the folders and clean out everything.
Note: We recommend that you remove the insides of these folders, but not the folders themselves.

Now, repeat the same steps above, but substitute…
~/Library/Caches with… /Library/Caches

Make sure that once you have finished clearing out these caches for additional hard drive space, you empty out your Trash. 

To do this, Control-click on the Trash icon in the dock and select “Empty Trash.” 

Restart your Mac afterward so your Mac can begin to create new, fresh cache files.