So since Macs are given such a paltry amount of RAM (disc space?), I have been trying to maintain my Mac Studio 1 TB to keep around 20% free. I had come across a bunch of folders in my Shared folder that had “Relocated items”, which included some CCC folders etc. I figured since it was “relocated” that something else had taken its place and I could delete them. Well, I can put them in the trash, but they remain “in use” with names like var, cache, configuration, Extensible SSO etc. I tried restarting, Shift Key start, Disk Utility (from Rescue Drive and not) and am still not able to get rid of them. Do I need to reinstall the Mac OS, and will that help at all? I am afraid to use terminal on it as they are “in use” and that persists through restarts, so something is using them. I have used OnyX which restarted right away, but they remain.
“Relocated Items” is confusing. I think the way it works is…
Let’s say you (or some application) has made a local change to a file in /etc, such as a configuration file. You install a macOS update. That update replaces the local modified file with the macOS standard version. The local versions are the “Relocated Items”.
Often you don’t actually need to save the Relocated Items. For example, if macOS Golden Gate has a change to a configuration file, the Tahoe version will be put in “relocated items”, even though you didn’t make the change. And there are some bugs where it is macOS that is making the change after boot, so it will put the previous version in Relocated Items on every minor update – there’s no way to stop that. The timezone file has this problem.
There’s another bug. Some files can’t be changed with System Integrity Protection (SIP) on. The problem is that SIP will prevent you from deleting the file from Relocated Items, even though the full path to Relocated Items is not the original location that should be protected. The only way to delete these files from Relocated Items is to either turn off SIP, or boot from another Startup drive.