TMPDIR=/var/folders/g7/2du11t4_b7mm24n184fn1k911300qq/T/ How to Access & Open the Temp Folder in Mac OS This will also reveal the same TMPDIR path by printing out something like the following: To be thorough, you can also use printenv to print environmental variables and use grep like so: In this case, the path to the macOS temp folder is “/var/folders/g7/7du81ti_b7mm84n184fn3k910000lg/T/” TMPDIR will always be a path to a seemingly nonsensical directory structure, because it is not intended to be user facing or user serviced, it’s a temp system folder afterall.įor example, using the above command you might see something like the following as the command output for echo $TMPDIR: The command output will be the Mac temporary directory.Open the Terminal application, found in /Applications/Utilities/ and type the following command string:.The simplest way to find where the Temp Folder of MacOS / Mac OS X is located is to use the echo command on the $TMPDIR environmental variable at the command line: How to Find Where the Temp Folder in Mac OS is Located If you somehow screw up and delete a critical system file or directory, you’ll have to follow these instructions to restore deleted system files by reinstalling core macOS system software. If for whatever reason you want to clear out the temporary items files on a Mac, simply reboot the computer to target system level temp files, while user level caches and temp files can be manually cleaned out if necessary for some reason or another.Īgain, do not attempt to manually modify anything and do not delete any files found in the Mac OS system temp folders. Almost nobody should dig around in the temp directories of macOS / Mac OS X, and you should not attempt to manually delete or remove any data from any of the tmp directories, as you may break something or completely screw up your system installation, or an app, or even active document data, thereby incurring data loss, or requiring reinstalling Mac OS X / or reinstalling macOS, or restoring from a backup.

This probably goes without saying, but this is aimed only at advanced Mac users.

This tutorial will show you where the temp folders are located on Mac OS and how you can access them.

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