MacBook terminal help

So, Mrs Spev has tried updating her MacBook air to the latest version of Catalina without checking hd space. Now it’s stuck in a reboot loop. I’ve got as far as repair mode and opened the terminal so I could delete a few unused files to make some space. Problem being I understand windows but Mac’s are a mystery. I’m unable to find the /users folder . I’ve tried cd ~/users to no avail.
All the googling says terminal opens in your user folder but that’s obviously when the damn thing has booted. I know Catalina has made its system files inaccessible but surely I can get to the users folder? My plan is to delete the 30gb of music on there and see if that helps.
Any ( simplistic) help would be much appreciated

Normally, your user folder is located at /Users/johnsmith/.

However for the case that you are in Recovery Mode, your user folder is located at /Volumes/Mac/Users/johnsmith/. This is because Recovery Mode is like another operation system started from another disk partition, so the disk partition with your main system appears as a mounted volume (like an external hard disk does normally).

Never had to do it but you could try cd /Volumes/Mac/Users/

Nah , doesn’t work.
I’ve found a /volumes directory that has a folder ( or dir) called Macintosh HD – Data
If I type cd /Macintosh HD – Data it tells me it doesn’t exist
I have tried reinstalling Mac os via recovery but that also fails due to lack of disc space too

If you’re in the volumes directory already you don’t need that first slash

With or without it tells me it doesn’t exist, it’s very frustrating as I’m pretty sure that’s where the users directory is. Other than downloading Catalina onto a USB stick and formatting and reinstalling I’m running out of ideas

Actually I think with folder names with spaces you have to put the whole name between single quotes?

cd ‘Macintosh HD – Data‘

You sir are a bloody genius
Apple on the other hand can take their Catalina update and sod off

👍

Yeah I think it’ll be a while yet before I update 😂

Actually I think with folder names with spaces you have to put the whole name between single quotes?

cd ‘Macintosh HD – Data‘

Yeah, that’s right. Or you can ‘quote’ the space by using a \ before any spaces in a path. However, both of those options are far more irritating than using tab completion. E.g I’d type ‘cd Mac’ and press tab to complete the line. It’ll fill in all the awkward spaces for you.

‘ls’ is your friend here. And google how to use zsh (or bash) to learn more.

So, Mrs Spev has tried updating her MacBook air to the latest version of Catalina without checking hd space.

Apple on the other hand can take their Catalina update and sod off

A tad unreasonable as this would appear to be a PICNIC error not a software error. TOMs do what they’re told even if it’s death.

So far (touches wood) Catalina has behaved itself for me but there’s some interesting stuff going on with music syncing from the Finder over wireless.

fair I suppose, it may be a tad harsh on Apple but even so, whenever a Windows update comes along it does check HD space and if its too low to continue then it returns to previous so you can clear out the crap, this update doesn’t do that (and it would appear we aren’t the only ones having this problem) it just falls into a reboot loop. Luckily for Mrs Spev i’m reasonably happy to delve in and sort it via things like terminal but without me she’d have to resort to the Apple store (theres not one locally) or some other repair shop at cost to her.
That’s unreasonable really when whilst she’s not entirely blameless the update didnt tell her how much space it needed (or indeed that it needed space). Whilst you or I would assume that space is needed, not everyone realises this. So to conclude , Apple can indeed take their poorly implemented update and sod off

Yep. Catalina, though working on my mac, has split iTunes and not in a way that helps me use my ipad… I wish at this moment in time, I hadn’t done it when tired, thinking it was a simple software update rather than a whole new OS.

cd ~/users

The squiggle character aka tilde means YOUR own home directory. You want /Users (capital U in case it’s a case-sensitive filesyste). ~/users would be a folder called ‘users’ in your own home directory which doesn’t exist. At least, it’s /Users on my Mac.

A tad unreasonable as this would appear to be a PICNIC error not a software error. TOMs do what they’re told even if it’s death.

Not checking free space is ridiculous. The Catalina update is a pile of crap. It removed support for 32 bit apps. If you depend on any 32 bit apps then **** you, we’re Apple we can do what the hell we like. It broke loads of apps all over the place including Cisco Webex that we use for work. Sure, you could blame the app vendors, but hey, Windows still supports 32 bit apps.

It also broke MS Word (64 bit version!) which caused the whole system to crash several times a day, until I rolled back to an earlier version.