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…