Secure Empty Trash hangs

Same problem here with a two month old iMac 2.8 and Leopard installed as an upgrade to Tiger. Secure trash hangs up. Sounds like no solutions available until Apple releases a fix.

I just "upgraded" (installed to a new HD) to Leopard. The first time I tried Secure Empty Trash on a couple of hundred files, it hung up with 4 files left. I had to relaunch the Finder to clear. Since then, I cannot reproduce the error. Secure Empty Trash is now working fine, for me at least.

It is interesting that when you do a secure empty trash the file count is almost always wrong. I purposely put 5 files in the trash and it counted them as 15 one time, 31 another, and 9 the third time. And yes, upon occasion, it will complete the command and empty. But only irregularly, as if on a whim.

Yes, you are not alone. This bug seems to affect everyone, G4, G5 and Dual Core.

As others have noted and my own experience has confirmed: -items in trash are miscounted, -it hangs up with usually just a few items left (in my case, 5 or 6 seems to be the magic number), -it does not matter how long you give it to overwrite (up to 12 hours in one try), -nor does the size of the file seem to have any bearing, and while it does seem to work if you choose Empty Trash instead of Secure Empty Trash, I have not seen any gain in disk space as I would normally expect too. I am really disappointed in having this bug on such a top line function. This should have been caught and corrected way before the release date. Let us hope that a fix will be on its way to us by week's end.

Same problem here running Leopard on a MacBook Pro, can't get rid of the full trash icon, tried removing all external drives and securely emptying but it always hangs on 5 files.

While the problem remains unresolved, I was able to regain some of my HD space by using the Disk Utility program. I verified the drive and no repairs were needed. Verified the permissions and I did find the follow: Warning: SUID file "System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/ARDAg ent" has been modified and will not be repaired.
Whatever! But once I came out of this I did have more space on my drive after I restarted. For the time being I will just use Empty Trash.

PB Boy wrote:
Yes, you are not alone. This bug seems to affect everyone, G4, G5 and Dual Core.

No, not everyone. It happened to me once and has not happened since. I suspect it may have been part of the initial indexing by spotlight.

Did that initial empty take longer than usual, with an apparent hang?

I am getting the hang problem described by others. I placed ONE item in the trash. When I go Secure Empty, it says it has to empty TEN items and hangs. I am going to leave it for a while and see if anything happens. I know Secure... takes longer but it was never this slow.

Message was edited by: Steve P.

I don't know that Spotlight had anything to do with it however I now note that having tried to secure delete a few times in the last couple of days it does now work. Odd.

And, of course, now having said that, I just tried it again and it is hung. Had 9 items in the Trash, it's choked with 5 to go. Has been hung there for several minutes.

2hrs and counting... still on 10 items...

Steve P. wrote:
Did that initial empty take longer than usual, with an apparent hang?

I had, I think, 10 very small items. It was hung for a couple of minutes, longer than it should have been with those very small items.

I am getting the hang problem described by others. I placed ONE item in the trash. When I go Secure Empty, it says it has to empty TEN items and hangs. I am going to leave it for a while and see if anything happens. I know Secure... takes longer but it was never this slow.

What was that one item? Sometimes, 1 item in MacOS X is actually a directory holding many items. You may already know that, of couse. I can't tell.

It seems to me that secure empty is actually quite a bit faster than it was under Tiger. I don't know if that is a good thing or not. Is it not over-writing as much? I think it is supposed to overwrite files 7 times with random data. If those files are large, that can take a while. It should be on the order of minutes for small files and up to an hour or more for large files.

Personally, I would put much more faith in secure empty trash if I could see the source. I need to know for sure they are turning off journaling for those files.

I always keep sensitive files in an encrypted archive anyway. Then I can just empty the trash without worrying about journaling.

If there is a "hang" in secure empty trash, I am 80% certain the "hang" is not in the secure file deletion. It is probably in the file count, or what the Finder thinks is the file count for the trash. If that could gets off, even by one, the Finder will stay in the "emptying trash" state forever. That doesn't necessarily means you files are still hanging around unencrypted. It just means the Finder is confused. I had hoped to fire up secure empty and then use Terminal to poke around in the Trash by hand and check the process activity to see what is actually going on. Unfortunately, I cannot reproduce the problem.

After waiting about 2 hours for Trash to finish a secure empty (it stalled on 5 items to delete), I force quit the Finder. When it restarted, the Trash was empty. Maybe you're right, the Trash is emptying, but the Finder just can't count.

I gave up and Forced Re-launch after 3 hrs. The 1 item was still there. I'll try again later, I guess!

Well I had the same problem, try everything even using the unix commands in Terminal....
But I use Cocktail 3.8.3 > Files > Locked > and drag all the Trash files on the side panel and it
DELETED!!! finally...