On Aug 16, 2007, at 8:46 PM, Nelsn Helm wondered: > Q: What makes it delete immediately, instead of keeping items in > the trash.
The trash on Mac OS X can be confusing. Troubleshooting its peculiarities can be frustrating. I don't know the cause of your problem, but knowing how the trash works can probably help you to figure it out. Every user on Mac OS X has an invisible directory at the root of her account called .Trash. This is where the Finder puts things when you delete them from the boot volume. On non-boot volumes, there is an invisible directory called .Trashes and every user who has trashed something on that volume has a subdirectory of .Trashes owned by her and called Trash. If she deletes something on the non-boot volume, it goes in that .Trashes/ Trash directory. When you show the contents of the trash in the Finder, it's actually showing you the union of the contents of all the .Trash directories owned by you. I can only think of one more case -- removable media. In that case, the Finder doesn't keep a .Trashes on the the volume; it just tells you that the item will be deleted immediately. There are two ways I can think of when you can get this "delete immediately" message from the Finder: (1) The Finder thinks your disk is removable like a USB thumb drive or Zip disk; or, (2) For some reason the .Trash or .Trashes directories don't exist, or have the wrong permissions for you to write to them. There's not a whole lot you can do about cause (1), except maybe try logging out/in or rebooting and remounting the volume. In the case of (2), you'll need a way to look at invisible files and their permissions. I'm sure someone has written a GUI tool to do this, but I've never looked for one because it's so easy to do in the terminal. If the .Trash or .Trashes is missing entirely, then make sure you have read/write permission for the volume and log out and back in. That should recreate the .Trash or .Trashes. Otherwise, you'll probably need to fix a permissions problem somewhere. (I don't know if repairing permissions in the Disk Utility is smart enough to do this.) -------------- 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/20070816/db1130d9/attachment.bin
