Apple - Not enough storage for El Capitan; no way to free up space
Boot to Recovery Mode (hold cmdR while booting). In the menubar open Utilities -> Terminal.
Now change your working directory and go to /Volumes:
cd /Volumes
List all volumes:
ls -l
Move to your main volume
cd name_of_main_volume
Now you can move forward to a directory to remove files and folders with cd folder_name
.
Appropriate paths to remove files or folders without touching your own data are:
/Volumes/name_of_main_volume/cores
/Volumes/name_of_main_volume/var/vm
Then remove files with rm file_name
or rm *.*
after making sure you are in the proper directory with pwd
and checking all files with ls -l
.
The folder cores may be empty, vm usually contains a sleep image and/or swap files which are all disposable.
If this doesn't suffice go to your applications or your user folder and remove files/folders.
To remove a folder use rm -R folder_name
. In this case application files (e.g. Maps.app) are also folders!