Catalina Update Relocated Items - Can't Delete or Empty Trash

Hi,

A couple of comments here:

First, prior to seeing faikbey's comment added above, I filed an issue on the XQuartz GitHub site here:

https://github.com/XQuartz/XQuartz/issues/1

as this appears to be an XQuartz related issue, for those that have installed it. Apple stopped including X11 in OS X 10.5, and XQuartz is the vehicle for its use since then for those that need that functionality.

There should ideally be an uninstall capability in XQuartz, but I was unable to locate one, other than this GitHub Gist here with a manual script:

https://gist.github.com/pwnsdx/d127873e24cef159d4d603accaf37ee4#file-gistfile1-txt

However, that uninstall would presumably only work on this issue if you knew about this problem prior to upgrading to Catalina. That is, you would uninstall XQuartz first, upgrade to Catalina, and then reinstall XQuartz.

Once you have upgraded to Catalina, with XQuartz in place, you get this underlying relocated items issue.

I did use the above gist scripts to uninstall XQuartz post Catalina upgrade, but that did not help in resolving the relocated files issue.

Second, one additional point to add to faikbey's comment, is that the user volumes are not mounted by default in Catalina in Recovery Mode, even in /Volumes. Thus, before going into the Terminal to do what faikbey suggests, you appear to need to go into the Disk Utility application and mount the Macintosh HD volumes in the left hand frame, to make them accessible from the Terminal. Once I did this, I could then navigate to my .Trash folder in my user account tree and delete the files.

After a reboot from Recovery Mode, all is well, at least in terms of the files in Trash being gone. Now, I need to reinstall XQuartz, as I need it for one of my applications, so we will see how that goes.

Hopefully, the XQuartz devs will note the issue and offer some better options for dealing with this, or provide other clarifications as apropos.

Thanks for this, @alanwsx. I tried a simpler approach based on your insight of using Recovery Mode and had success just doing this:

1. Reboot and go to Cmd+R recovery mode
2. Open Terminal
3. Navigate to the Trash folder (e.g. cd /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Users/USERNAME_GOES_HERE/.Trash
4. Delete everything manually by `rmdir -rf Relocated\ Items`. No sudo is required in Recovery Mode.
5. If it succeeds (it did for me!), reboot to normal mode and you're done. If not, continue your instructions at Step 2.

You might try using the terminal by doing the following:

MacBook-Pro:~ elmaton$ cd .Trash
MacBook-Pro:.Trash elmaton$ sudo rm -rf Relocated\ Items

Make sure you have admin rights or sudo won't work.

So here is what I did for removing that folder:

1. Reboot and go to Cmd+R recovery mode
2. disable SIP by `csrutil disable`
3. Reboot to normal mode and delete that folder, empty trash
4. Reboot and go to Cmd+R recovery mode
5. re-enable SIP by `csrutil enable`
6. Reboot to normal mode

1. Enable root user on mac
2. switch to root user in terminal
3. rm -rf Relocated...

I had the same issue, here is how I fixed it:

Restarted using recovery mode (command-R)

From the top menu bar choose utilities and launch terminal

Type df to see all the mounted hard drives since recovery mode doesn't mount your hard drive to / but to /Volumes/Macintosh HD (or what have you).

Go to your mounted volume, in there /Volumes/Macintosh HD/Users/<username>/.Trash and do sudo rm -rf *

Check with ls to see if it worked, it should.

Close terminal and restart again, trash should be empty

Restart your computer and try again.

I did the "sudo rm -rf" and it worked but after a few days of lag, touchbar suddenly stopping working until reset and some other inconveniences I just erased the HD and reinstalled Catalina.

For people who are not tech-savvy, this solution does not work. Apple should come up with a solution.

Opening the folder and attempting to delete individually didn’t work on mine, I just deleted the entire folder right off my desktop. Emptied Trash = gone.

Correct certainly Apple is aware of that and will fix the issue shortly. Just want to add no matter how Tim Cook is excellent , Apple wasn't his dream so I noticed several issues whether on Mac or iPhone even though most of the times could be ignored.

I do consider myself computer-fluent, but I am not willing to go through 4 reboots just for deleting one folder. This problem was created by Apple. It is so obvious that it's hard to imagine how they missed it.

Where is the solution, Apple? Chop Chop!

Thank you for the advice. For a reason I can't identify, I am unable to put my iMac in recovery mode. Any suggestion for solving this problem?

Instead of having to figure this out only for the sake of a deletion of a single file, it would be better for me, as well as for anyone else who is still stuck with this useless file in their trash if Apple came out with a faster and simpler solution.