As I said, my first inclination was to suggest "applejack AUTO" (but I suspect that would have been futile); either it or SL Cache Cleaner, which I believe also has "deep" cache cleaning functionality, may very well have turned the trick.
Yep, AppleJack is pretty thorough, and —since it works from single-user mode —it has no competitor when login and/or normal startup is not possible (the only condition being it needs to be installed ahead of time).
Bresnik gives a good description of that particular TTS feature here:
The Pane Cachesidunno, all of the apps mentioned in the posts above have various options for cache cleaning... and i'm not sure if
“i tried that and it didn't work†tells us the full story.
In the end however, there are only a handful of 'standard' places where
caches are
supposed to be placed... and i'm not aware of (read: don't believe in) any
secret locations which would require any special
tricks.
$ sudo -s
Password:
# ls -d /var/folders/*/*/-Caches- {,/System,/Users/*/,/var/root}/Library/Caches
/Library/Caches
/System/Library/Caches
/Users/halito/Library/Caches
/var/folders/Ap/Ap8ZG0DPEpu2FgJTwuRPoU+++TI/-Caches-
/var/folders/zz/zzzivhrRnAmviuee+++++++++++/-Caches-
/var/folders/zz/zzzivhrRnAmviuee++++4U+++-c/-Caches-
/var/folders/zz/zzzivhrRnAmviuee++++EE+++22/-Caches-
/var/folders/zz/zzzivhrRnAmviuee++++KE+++3Y/-Caches-
/var/folders/zz/zzzivhrRnAmviuee++++L++++3k/-Caches-
/var/folders/zz/zzzivhrRnAmviuee++++ME+++42/-Caches-
/var/folders/zz/zzzivhrRnAmviuee++++nE+++Ao/-Caches-
/var/folders/zz/zzzivhrRnAmviuee++++p++++BE/-Caches-
Names may differ slightly below /var/folders, but the blue command should work for all Leo/Snowy machines.
Edit: the
ls -d command just
lists the names of those folders. To see their
content, change
-d to
-la or something.
Edit 2: changed the above command sequence to grab a root shell first. (shell pattern matching requires it to "see into" other user accounts)
Edit 3: hmm... for completeness, i added /var/root/Library/Caches as well... but it appears "empty" here so far:
ls: /var/root/Library/Caches: No such file or directory
--
While that covers what are technically considered cache locations... there are a similar number of "temporary" files which could be dispensed with as well (though one would hope a regular old restart would clear same).
--
Admittedly, searching my own library for 'cache' in folders
other than Caches produces way too many results:
find ~/Library -not -path '*/Library/Caches*' -iname '*cache*'
[meaning: some apps don't always put "cache data" where they're
supposed to.] And who knows what sort of data which should go into a cache area isn't actually winding up stuffed
inside a plist in Preferences?
