On Mar 12, 2013, at 11:08 AM, Bill Brown <[email protected]> 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 -- -- You received this message because you are a member of the iMac Group, a group for those using Apple iMacs and eMacs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/imac/list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To leave this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/imaclist --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "iMac Group" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
