Q: delete difficult files?
On my MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013) I have files I cannot delete. They were created as a local Time Machine archive when the regular destination was not available.
When I discovered them I tried moving to the trash and emptying. The files were copied into the trash, not moved, so I have to find a different way. I was able to get all of them together in one folder, "TrashMe", in my home user space. I do not know much UNIX, but I tried sudo rm, rmdir, etc. I deleted enough that these are no longer Time Machine archives, but still a lot remains. I looked down through the folder structure and found Crashplan files at the bottom. Crashplan tech support helped me get rid of those, but more remains which I cannot delete. I get error messages, some of which I will show.
In Finder, I select TrashMe, and Get Info shows "You can read and write" and these users have these permissions
everyone Read & Write
ritch (Me) Read & Write
everyone Read & Write
I changed the permissions to as shown, then chose Apply to enclosed items. However, that did not work. Within TrashMe are folders like this
I have no access to these files in Finder. In Terminal I can ls and cd my way through the file structure. I find structures like
Trash me/MobileBackups_2015-10-11-203305/Computer/2015-10-10-041640/Volume/System/Lib rary/Core Services/file:///Users/ritch/TrashMe/MobileBackups_2015-10-11-032838/Computer/2 015-10-09-080851/Volume/System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/
I think what happened is Time Machine, perhaps interacting in some confused way with Crashplan, created local archives of my system files, and the system files have special protection so users cannot accidentally erase them. If Time Machine could recognize this as an archive, probably it has way to delete protected files, but I mangled the file structure so it no longer looks like an archive.
I think there must be a way to do this in Terminal. Can someone please suggest command lines which I should type to erase these files? There are I think tens of thousands of files, so please give me recursive forms
Mac Pro, OS X El Capitan (10.11.6), MacPro 3,1 Accelsior PCIe SSD
Posted on Sep 14, 2016 8:34 PM
