On Mar 12, 2013, at 11:08 AM, Bill Brown thunder...@mindspring.com wrote:
Greetings all.
I posted this to the Mac Mini and the Intel Mac groups, but no response,
so I am posting it here in hopes that someone can advise me.
The basics:
Mac Mini, 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB RAM.
The problem:
I cannot make the trash empty.
I have tried everything under the sun, as far as I know, trying to get the
trash
to empty. Unlocked any folders/files, re-booted numerous times (both regular
and Safe Boot), ran Disk Utilities (fixed permissions), and still no success.
two things to try:
1: GUI way: hold down the option key while selecting 'Empty Trash'to force
emptying the trash in the Finder,
2: Geeky way: start up a terminal window and enter
rm -rf ~/.Trash/*
EXACTLY. rm -rf is like nitroglycerin…useful for cracking safes, but you can
also occasionally blow yourself to kingdom come; or in the case of rm -rf
delete everything in your user directory or on the entire disk.
True story: one of my co-workers once typed ( as root, on a production unix
systme, iirc it was an old SGI box) rm -rf / where he meant to type rm -rf ./
Subtle, but the difference between deleting the current directory's contents
and deleting the file system.
This was in the ye olde days of slow disks and slow systems, he was actually
able to stop the command without nuking the user directories. The OS was
hosed, but he managed to manually rebuild it to the point where he could
sucessfully reboot the system and restore the whole thing.
3: when nothing else will work (I've had to do this for one user several times
on her Macbook; we've never been able to figure how her Trash keeps getting
wedged like this) you can remove the trash directory entirely, and recreate it.
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/trash.html#Anchor-Empty-49575
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20061216221914302
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10410978-263.html
--
Bruce Johnson
University of Arizona
College of Pharmacy
Information Technology Group
Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs
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