Hibernate File Issue with MacBook 2012 Update

Seems that the list of annoyances I have to deal with after each and every OS X update just grown a bit. Besides the usual

chflags nohidden ~/Library

command that unhides the Library folder, now I have to do some extra work to reclaim the space normally occupied by the hibernate file (/var/vm/sleepimage). I do not use hibernation on my notebooks. I shut them down when I finished. I prefer to start with clean state on every boot, but equally I’m not fond of wasting 17 gigabytes of expensive SSD space on a file that I never use.

In the past you could turn off hibernation with

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0
sudo rm /var/vm/sleepimage

But after today’s release of “Update 2.0 for all Mac notebooks introduced in June 2012”, I had to do some extra work. The issue is: regardless of the state of the hibernatemode switch, the hibernate file (stored in /var/vm/sleepimage) is recreated on every boot. Bummer.

Fortunately you can also set the location of the file, so all I had to do is to send it into a black hole:

sudo pmset -a hibernatefile /dev/null

Everything works fine with this setup, but I fear that the next update could bring some more surprises…