On Jul 6, at 1:22 PM, Nelsn Helm wrote: > I have used Terminal, but don't know how to find .Trashes on the > external HD.
It's usually right at the root of the drive in the guise of a directory called .Trashes. The leading . is important because that makes the directory invisible most of the time. > I have used Delete It, a shareware program, which advises me to log > in as "root user." I've had most success doing things like this from the (dreaded) terminal. I usually do it by making myself root in the terminal. The easiest way is to issue the command sudo su in an administrative account terminal window. It will ask you for a password. Enter the password of the administrative account under which you are logged in. Now, suppose your external drive has the name MyExternalDrive [1]. Try cd /Volumes/MyExternalDrive/.Trashes to get you to the trash directory on that drive. Do an ls -a to list the files there. This will make sure you're in the right place. Then rm -rvf filename will kill a file or directory. Or rm -rvf * kills all the files and directories in sight. When you're done, close the terminal window by clicking the red jellybean. [1] There is a gotcha here. If the file name has spaces in it, you should either quote it or escape the spaces with \ ; e.g., My External Drive becomes My\ External\ Drive. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: smime.p7s Type: application/pkcs7-signature Size: 2452 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://www.math.louisville.edu/pipermail/macgroup/attachments/20070706/ce086ef9/attachment.bin
