Recipes

Real-world scenarios and the fastest way to diagnose them with oops.

“My disk is full and I don’t know why”

Start with the overview, then drill:

oops
oops drill ~

The drill auto-follows the biggest child at each level. In one command you’ll trace the path from your home directory to the specific file or directory eating all your space — often Docker data, Xcode DerivedData, or a forgotten game install.

“What’s taking up space in this repo?”

cd ~/repos/my-project
oops

The default overview shows a proportional breakdown. Usually it’s target/, node_modules/, or .git/. For deeper visibility:

oops tree --depth 4

“Is Docker eating my disk?”

oops drill ~/Library/Containers/com.docker.docker

This drills through Data/vms/0/data/ and shows you Docker.raw’s actual on-disk size (not the inflated apparent size). If it’s huge:

# In Docker Desktop: Settings → Resources → Virtual disk limit
# Or prune unused data:
docker system prune -a

“Where are all my node_modules?”

oops sweep ~

Sweep detects node_modules directories across your entire home folder. The summary shows total reclaimable space by category. For details:

oops sweep ~ --verbose

This lists every individual waste entry with its path, so you can decide what to nuke:

# Delete a specific one
rm -rf ~/old-project/node_modules

# Or nuke them all (careful!)
oops sweep ~ --verbose | grep node_modules

“Xcode is eating 50 GB again”

oops sweep ~

Sweep checks ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData and ~/Library/Developer/CoreSimulator automatically. To see just how bad it is:

oops drill ~/Library/Developer

Clean up:

rm -rf ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData
# Xcode will rebuild what it needs

“What are the biggest files on my machine?”

oops top ~ --depth 8 -n 30

This does a deep recursive scan and shows the 30 largest items. Filter to just files:

oops top ~ --depth 8 --files-only --min-size 500MB

“Which volume is running out of space?”

oops vol

Color-coded capacity bars: green (< 70%), yellow (< 90%), red (>= 90%). Shows all mounted filesystems with used/total/free.

“I freed space but disk still shows full”

macOS uses APFS snapshots and purgeable space. Check with:

oops vol

If the volume still shows full after deleting files, Time Machine snapshots may be holding references. macOS will purge these eventually, or you can force it:

tmutil listlocalsnapshots /
tmutil deletelocalsnapshots <date>

“What’s in ~/Library?”

~/Library is a black box. Drill into it:

oops drill ~/Library

Common offenders:

• Application Support/ — app data (Steam games, Slack, etc.)
• Caches/ — safe to delete, apps rebuild them
• Containers/ — sandboxed app data (Docker lives here)
• Developer/ — Xcode caches and simulators
• pnpm/ — pnpm global store

“Compare two directories”

Run the overview on each:

oops /path/to/dir-a
oops /path/to/dir-b

Or use top to find the biggest items in each:

oops top /path/to/dir-a -n 10
oops top /path/to/dir-b -n 10

“Automated disk monitoring”

Use --plain mode for scripts:

# Alert if any volume > 90%
oops vol --plain 2>&1 | awk '{print $5}' | grep -q '9[0-9]%' && echo "DISK ALERT"

“Cargo registry is huge”

oops drill ~/.cargo

The registry cache grows with every unique dependency version you’ve ever built. Clean old versions:

cargo cache --autoclean
# or
rm -rf ~/.cargo/registry/cache

“Where do I start on a new machine?”

oops vol
oops drill ~
oops sweep ~

Three commands. You now know your volume health, your biggest space consumer, and all the reclaimable waste. Takes about 30 seconds total.