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Avast antivirus says that my mac running Mojave has 1.25 GB of "unnecessary logs":

Avast notification about unnecessary logs

The Avast website does not provide information about their meaning.

What are they? How can I delete them with on the Terminal command-line?

miguelmorin
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    I would ask Avast what they mean. Without clarification, I'm not sure I would trust Avast's definitions. Caches don't go off like fish, and the necessity of logs is subjective at best. I would just delete your trash and be done with it. (You could also save space by deleting Avast, of course.) ;-) – benwiggy Jul 09 '21 at 11:53
  • I asked at: https://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=289671.0 – miguelmorin Jul 11 '21 at 08:39

1 Answers1

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My guess is they want to sell you a paid cleanup product so this is the call to action.

Instead of using a third party tool, I would first make sure you are happy with Apple recommendations on disk clean up.

Your storage is likely SSD and the data stays written and only gets purged when needed by the OS so stale cache seems a misnomer and the same goes for log files. Those should rotate and Apple tools or Daisy Disk give me a much better idea where the space is used if I need to take action.

The terminal command I use to engage the clean up of stale files and secure, patch and update my Mac is

softwareupdate —-all —-install —-restart
bmike
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    Worth mentioning that the Terminal command has some 'side-effects', like installing any OS upgrades pending! – benwiggy Jul 09 '21 at 14:52
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    Yes, secure means apply all patches! Downloaded patches and lack of restart can cause cleanup jobs to stick, it’s not common, but can be all that’s needed @benwiggy thanks for improving the answer with a great comment. – bmike Jul 09 '21 at 15:26
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    @bmike Patches are in --recommended, not --all. – Marc Wilson Jul 09 '21 at 16:02