Osx

Shortcuts

• Hold down "d" on boot to do a hardware test
• Hold down alt/option on boot to boot into safe mode
• Hold down apple + "s" on boot for single user mode
• Hold down apple + "v" on boot for verbose mode
• Command + Control + Power also brings one into single user mode

dynamic_paging

I noticed on my MacBook Air that after a few weeks I would run out of diskspace, without downloading anything, forcing me to reboot. Before I did, I checked /tmp and nothing looked large enough. Bryan F from [yh] pointed out "man dynamic_pager"

$ ls -la /private/var/vm/swapfile
$ sysctl vm.swapusage

I noticed gigs worth of files! At your own risk:

$ sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist

and reboot. After reboot, sysctl vm.swapusage shows 0 and /private/var/vm/swapfile is empty. replace "unload" with "load" above to revert to default.