Recently on Twitter, I saw a mention of a
CLI tool that promised to free up space on my Mac. Disk space is definitely one of my pain points. Even with 500 GB, I often get warnings that there’s no space left and that I need to delete something.The tool is called Mole, and it’s open source on GitHub. There’s only one problem: security. I’m a little hesitant to run random
CLI tools that have full access to my file system. With Mole, I had double doubts — it’s called “Mole,” and it comes from a developer in 🇨🇳China. That sounds a little suspicious, doesn’t it?At first, I thought: if they were developing and distributing spyware, they would probably try to hide it better instead of being so straightforward. But we live in a meta-ironic world, and maybe they’re playing on a different level, so people like me end up installing “Mole from China” on their laptops themselves.
Anyway, I wanted to check it more carefully. I browsed the GitHub repo — it looked decent. People were submitting issues, and the maintainer was pushing updates. Still, I wanted to be sure, so I installed it via
Homebrew, checked the source code, and even copy-pasted the bash scripts into ChatGPT to review them. The LLM said they were fine 📈.So I ran
mo clean --dry-run. Everything went fine. Then I ran mo clean for real, and again there were no issues.Overall, I recovered about
70 GB of space, and everything is still running smoothly.I’d say I recommend this tool, it has a nice UX and works well. But in the end, it’s up to you whether you want to install Mole from China on your laptop 🙌.
