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Comment by nuker

5 hours ago

Hmm, Full Disk Access perm is not enough?

Full Disk Access just gives an application the same filesystem powers that your user account has. For most users that means it has administrator level access, which is the 3rd highest tier.

There are two levels above an administrator-level account: 1) the root user can access files that an administrator can't (e.g. the files of other users and certain system configuration files), and 2) the kernel and system processes can access "system" files that even root cannot - this is enforced by SIP.

Apple is quite liberal in what they hide away with SIP. It's possible for disk space to leak whereby the OS has decided to store some file that it doesn't need and there is no way to even list such files without following the above instructions - the only indication will be a mysteriously large amount of space taken up by the system.

It goes without saying that if you're going to delete system files you should make sure you know what you're doing.