Home Forums Mac Software Mac Operating Systems Unused folders in Library

In User>MyUserName>Library:
40 items
14 folders are completely empty
4 folders contain only empty folders

Do these "empty" folders contain invisible files?

What would happen if the folders were deleted?

My finger is not on the mouse. Just asking!

Logging in as Guest gives you a completely virgin account. When I do that, I count 23 folders in ~/Library, 15 of which are empty (and a few others contain only empty subfolders).

I think the main reason for creating those empty folders is to let users know where they can put things, to customize their system. For example, it's pretty obvious what sorts of things one might add to Fonts, Sounds, Internet Plug-Ins, Favorites, etc.

It also alleviates the common problem when you tell someone "put that file in ~/Library/x...x" or "check to see what you have in ~/Library/x...x". If the folder isn't already there, they may come back and say "I don't have such a folder". Or worse, they'll think you made a typo and look only at "/Library/x...x". Having the folder there, even if empty, reassures them that they're looking in the right place.

If anything, I'm more surprised that some of the more common and useful (in my estimation) subfolders are not present. Where are ~/Library/Scripts and ~/Library/Scripts/Folder Actions? I admit that scripting is a little geeky, but c'mon, they included subfolders for Input Managers and Internet Plug-Ins!

I was also surprised at some of the folders that were already populated. Why does ~/Library/Calendars have anything at all in it? I hadn't expected it would contain anything at all until the first time you ran iCal. (But then I remembered. iCal is just the GUI front end for the Calendar Store, which might well have run in the background without any user-visible interaction.)

I'm pretty sure that any empty folders you delete will simply be re-created when needed. However, 17 of the 23 subfolders of ~/Library have the "group:everyone deny delete" ACL that will prevent you from putting that to the test. You could circumvent that easily, but I generally don't ignore "DON'T DO THAT!" signs without a really good reason.

The empty folders may contain invisible .DS-Store files, but most of them don't contain any meaningful files.

However, deleting some of these folders may cause problems for some installers. For example, if you install Safari browser plug-ins, and the installer for the plug-in can't find the internet plug-ins folder, it may stop without installing the plug-in, depending on how it's written.

You don't gain anything from removing these folders, so I'd recommend leaving them as they are.

That is stating the obvious; they're empty. But, both answers were very instructive, and satisfied my curiosity. Thanks!

The mac app philosophy is to make things when you need them if they're not present. It's a common practice for example to delete an application's preferences file if it's misbehaving, because if it's missing, the app should build itself a fresh one (instead of crashing because it's missing) and hopefully with its settings back at default things will work properly again.

So seeing little there to begin with isn't surprising. Folders and files are often created on-the-fly when they are needed.

Just because a folder is currently empty does not mean it is unused. It may be a folder that is only temporarily empty because of an app that does a good job of cleaning up after itself. There are several nice utilities that will search for and identify files and folders that have not been used in some period of time, such as a year, and offer the opportunity to delete those files/folders if you want. My current favorite for this is CleanApp, but there are several others.

My rule of thumb is any file, folder, or property list that has not been accessed within a year is a candidate for deletion. In most cases if an app needs that file or folder at some point in the future it will be recreated automatically. That rule of thumb, augmented by some cautious judgement, has never let me down so far.

My Mac always saved those stupid ._DS STORE files to my flash drive!

But I can do that with Get Info. I suppose a utility just makes the process faster, eh?

Right, takes the guess work out of figuring out where to look. Personally though, if it's not sucking disk space, I don't worry about it.

My Mac always saved those stupid ._DS STORE files to my flash drive!

there is a plist setting to prevent plists from being written to network shares, but as for flash drives, I think you're outa luck

Not worried, just wondering....
Great explanations above!