When you bought your Mac, it came with a number of applications installed, and you may have downloaded and installed many others. The first place to look to sweep out unneeded cruft on your Mac is in your Applications folder. In this article, I’m going to show you how to uncover and delete some unneeded files that may be taking up a lot of space on your Mac. This is especially important if you have a Mac with an SSD and limited storage. Still, there are more insidious files cluttering your Mac these can be hidden in folders you may not see, or, sometimes, in plain sight. This is the first step toward cleaning out your Mac and freeing up space on your drive. In a recent article, we looked at how you can get rid of duplicate files on your Mac. for example python3 instead of python) - or using an alias in your shell so that 'python' really runs a differently named program.How To + Recommended How to Uncover and Delete Hidden Files Cluttering Your Mac and Save Space Instead I would advise you to either use a different name for the program (i.e. However, I would strong discourage that as you would risk breaking Apple-supplied tools that depend on the specific python version - and you would probably have to fight a never-ending battle where the link is restored during macOS upgrades. In theory, you could disable SIP, mount the system volume as writable, change the python link and re-sign the whole thing. This means that it looks and feels like it used to do on older versions of macOS - everything is in the right place so to speak - but in actual fact the system files cannot be changed during normal system operation. Its contents is mixed into your normal read-write mounted file system through the use of so called firmlinks.

The system folders on Big Sur are actually contained on a separate, cryptographically signed file system (system volume) that is mounted read-only at boot. Therefore noone, even admin users, can change the contents of the directory while SIP is active.

The root cause here is that the /usr/bin directory is protected by SIP (System Integrity Protection).

How to delete system files on mac