Trash and Finder Mystery..........

Question

Level 1

47 points

Trash and Finder Mystery..........

I've deleted a 12 mp3s. When I open trash it says 12 items however when I go to secure empty and the emptying trash dialog box appears it says Items to delete 24. Can someone please explain to me why this is occurring. This was never an issue in 10.4

G4, G5, MacBook, Mac OS X (10.5.6), Dual 500, dual MacPro, MacBook, RD, VMware, Intel Vista

Posted on Mar 10, 2009 11:44 AM

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Answer 1

KJK555

Level 4

2,900 points

Mar 10, 2009 12:01 PM in response to DwainC

It is most likely also counting hidden items in secure mode.

Just for grins, run the following terminal.app command
and count the items:
ls -ael ~/.Trash

If there are only 12 items there, then your guess is as good as mine.

Kj

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Answer 2

KJK555

Level 4

2,900 points

Mar 10, 2009 12:54 PM in response to DwainC

Did a little more digging for an answer:

If the secure empty trash command operates similarly (and it probably does) to the "srm" command
in terminal (terminal command for securely deleting files), srm removes each specified file by
overwriting, renaming, and truncating it before unlinking. This prevents other people from
undeleting or recovering any information about the file from the command line.

These operations would generate temporary files or links that would have to be deleted as well.

Kj

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Answer 3

DwainC Author

Level 1

47 points

Mar 10, 2009 2:15 PM in response to KJK555

Maybe you can explain this as I am not that adept with Terminal. I've emptied the trash and then in Terminal I run the command and this is the response

"smileyface$ ls -ael ~/.Trash
total 0
drwx------ 2 smileyface smileyface 68 Mar 10 13:43 .
drwxr-xr-x@ 33 smileyface smileyface 1122 Mar 10 08:13 ..
0: group:everyone deny delete

?

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Answer 4

KJK555

Level 4

2,900 points

Mar 10, 2009 2:45 PM in response to DwainC

If you emptied it then will be no files in there, and that is exactly what it shows.

After some experimentation though, I believe my second answer is more accurate; the shredding
process generates temp files that must be dealt with as well, temporarily upping the file count.

Kj

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