Caches

Greetings, I administer Macintosh computers for our student computing labs at Stony Brook University. I currently have close to 200 client (10.5.8 intel Macs) and 10 or so Xserves. I haven't yet upgraded the clients to 10.6.4 since MCX settings seems to be an unresolved issue from Apple. But that's for another time. I came across another issue which is the subject of my post. All our computers authenticate from our campus AD. I have OD servers to manage the computers, and other various things. All home directories on the clients are local. I have a script that removes said home directories after several days of no use. However it seems that the script broke, and I have to go in and fix it. In the meantime, I got complaints that some computers were slowing down, for obvious reasons, since the hard drives were filling up from all the home directories. We have over 22,000 students here, so many people will end up logging into my client computers. I manually (over SSH) removed old user home directories on the reported computers to quickly get them back up and functional. However, I came across some folders which contained gigs upon gigs of data which seems to be cached data for what little info Google comes up with. The folders are located in /private/var/folders (also known as /var/folders). What little I found on Google didn't help. Some say it's user cache data, and also system data. No one seems to be able to agree if it's okay to just delete everything. On one of the computers, there are 660 folders inside /private/var/folders/ for a total of 30 Gigs of data. I tried a few cache cleaning utilities, but they seem to ignore said folders. So how do I slim this data down? Andrew ----------------------------------------------------- Andrew W. Johnson Lead Programmer Analyst Department of Teaching Learning + Technology Division of Information Technology Stony Brook University S-1464 Frank Melville Jr. Memorial Library Stony Brook, NY 11794-3350