Secure empty trash

Welcome to Apple Discussions, Steve,

It is working that way for me and many others, too:

  http://discussions.apple.com/search.jspa?objID=c235&search=Go&q=secureemptytrash

I have not found a fix yet.

EZ Jim

PowerBook 1.67 GHz w/Mac OS X (10.4.10) G5 DP 1.8 w/Mac OS X (10.5)  External iSight

only way at this point in time is to force quit finder to exit the secure empty trash "freeze"

its just another stuff up from Apple. and i hope they can fix all the issues very very quickly for loyal users who bought this terrible OS Leopard in good faith.

Not fixed in 10.5.1

Same here. Not fixed in 10.5.1

I'm having the same problem. I've never used Secure Empty Trash before using Time Machine (it's the only way to delete items forever) and it takes a long time. At first I thought that was normal, but it takes so long I usually end up just canceling it and then just deleting stuff.

The problem is, I just deleted a BUNCH of games that have numerous files all over my system and I wanted to delete that stuff forever.

FWIW, if you click "Secure Empty Trash" under the Finder preferences, it seems to empty normally. If you click Secure Empty Trash in the Finder menu, it appears to take forever, as indicated.

Glad to see I'm not the only one.

Message was edited by: glb

The problem is, I just deleted a BUNCH of games that have numerous files all over my system and I wanted to delete that stuff forever.

Keep in mind that there still is no forever with Secure Empty.
Read about Secure Empty

Joe Gramm wrote:
Keep in mind that there still is no forever with Secure Empty.

It would seem that Secure Empty is deleted forever if it's done right.

Either way, not only do I not want this on my system, but I want to delete it from the Time Machine backups. I deleted a LOT of stuff off my system, and I need to get it off of TM, and now it seems like I'll have to do that manually.

Not really the best option, since we all know apps leave a lot of crap behind. That's why I used AppZapper, then wanted to securely delete everything, even from TM just to save on room.

It seems that Apple hasn't really thought this through.

Message was edited by: glb

Have you recently turned OFF Time Machine.
I had items in the trash which had been stored in time machine backups.
Then I turned Time Machine off.
Then later I added items to the trash.
When I then tried to secure delete - and got the hang you describe.
Turning Time Machine back on, then secure deleting succeeded in deleting all files without the hang.

I've seen Leopard randomly succeed/fail to empty the trash at different times -- including it working for me yesterday and not today, which is what brought me here -- and I've never run Time Machine on this Mac.

Relaunching the Finder kills the process and restores control of the trash. Do a Force Quit... and select Finder.

Hello all,

It is happening to me too.
Not all the time - but most of the time. Out of 10 times, 9 failed and perhaps only 1 time succeeded.

The same as most of the post that I have read - the Trash icon will appears to be empty but somehow the Secure Empty Trash process bar seems to be in the processing status forever when it comes to show that there's only 5 items left. Although by performing a Force Quit to the finder solve everything. But a bug is a bug. It should be fix and we shouldn't be living like this. 🙂

Some say that - after they Secure Empty Trash, got stuck, and Force Quit finder - they found out that there's still some hidden files remain in the Trash. Although I am not sure how to they saw the hidden files. But it seems that - it happens to me too. As I was trying to Secure Empty Trash a halfway downloaded file (just one file and not folder), the Secure Empty Trash process bar stated there's 20 items to be trash. ~ Weird ~ That cycle was successfully completed though.

Anyway, I was wondering - Does this happen to ALL Mac OS X Leopard user? Or does this only happen to those who performed an upgrade installation? and it doesn't happen to those with clean installation? Or the chances was just 50 - 50 percent? Some got lucky and some don't?

Do we by any chance know someone out there who doesn't seems to have this problem? Could it be just a single string/script that was mess-up?

Best Regards,

Jon Gan

It's happening to me too. Just upgraded to 10.5.1. Secure emptying on 10.3.9 was breeze; now it takes forever.

I hope that someone at Apple is paying attention to this problem, and that we can look forward to a prompt fix. I work with documents that have sensitive information, and I consider this to be an essential feature.

I have the sme problem... only it says I have 844 items to delete?!?! I only have like 50 items in the trash. I'm willing to except that there are other files I may be over looking but that still feels like a lot to me. Its froze up before when It told me I had fewer items too. Yup still sitting there. HELP!

I've been cleaning up my HD and had this issue. Seems that I can delete hundreds of files (in a lengthy, but not unreasonable time), but when the countdown gets to 4 or 5, it hangs up. While making progress against the list of files, there is a process call Locum that is consuming processor time. When the hang occurs, Locum is still running, but no longer using much CPU. Using Terminal, I can see that the ~/.Trash folder is empty (no hidden files either), but since Secure Empty is supposed to be overwriting the files in place, I'm not sure anything of significance would be shown in ~/.Trash anyway except for links to the actual files.

As mentioned above, a relaunch of Finder restores things, but I always reboot after a relaunch just in case the gremlins are still running. After the restart, a normal Empty Trash works fine.

As pointed out, Secure Empty Trash invokes the Locum process, which is a wrapper/placeholder allowing "srm" (secure remove) and other utilities to overwrite or remove files they normally might not have permission to access.

Under normal circumstances, Secure Empty Trash may take a very long time to finish, so long that it may appear to "hang" when it really hasn't. Whenever securely removing large amounts of data, run Activity Monitor with All Processes ordered by CPU usage, and wait 15 minutes to several hours for Locum or srm to finish; if you interrupt Locum by restarting, canceling, or force-quitting, you could leave your HD in an indeterminate state, so you'll need to boot from the Install DVD to repair the HD, not just the permissions.

Under the worst circumstances, Leopard can encounter a permissions problem affecting Locum that Disk Utility cannot repair. Here's how to diagnose and fix it:

1. After verifying that the trash can is completely empty, use TextEdit to save a tiny, one-character text file named "Foo" to the startup drive, then quit Text Edit and drag "Foo" to the trash. While the Activity Monitor window is showing All Processes ordered by CPU Usage, do a Secure Empty Trash and time how long the Locum process takes to complete. If it takes less than a minute or so, it's running normally; otherwise, proceed to step 2.

2. Launch Disk Utility, select the startup volume, and repair permissions. When done, if you see more than one "Warning: SUID file ... has changed an could not be repaired" message, then you need to proceed to step 3; otherwise, step 3 won't help you. In particular, if you see "Locum" in any of the SetUID warnings, then step 3 is very likely to fix the problem.

3. Re-apply the Mac OS X 10.5.1 Updater by downloading it from:
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/macosx1051update.html
After running the updater again and rebooting, repeat steps 1 and 2 to see if the problem has been fixed.

Anecdotal testimony notwithstanding, Secure Empty Trash has always taken much longer than a normal Empty Trash because it physically overwrites the disk space several (usually 7 to 35) times. Emptying the trash insecurely is far faster because it doesn't take the time to overwrite the file.

However, the extra time for secure removal may only be noticeable in extreme situations. Overwriting large or numerous files can take significantly longer than removing fewer, smaller files. Securely removing files from external drives usually takes longer than from internal drives. Mac HFS+ file systems can be overwritten faster than others. Issues with Time Machine and Locum do increase the amount of time necessary to securely remove files, but in my experience, only marginally when there aren't permissions problems.