Remove file from thumb drive on MacBook Air running macOS Monterey

Open Finder, select your thumb drive from the sidebar, find the file you want to delete, right-click or control-click it, and choose "Move to Trash." Finally, empty your Trash while the drive is still plugged in to permanently delete the file and free up space.

Babs_Roc wrote:

Thanks for getting back to me! The problem has been solved. Nothing worked because the file on the thumb drive was saved on a Windows platform. I was able to easily delete the file on my husband's Windows computer and then reformatted the thumb drive to exFAT on my MAC.

I take it that the USB flash drive was formatted using NTFS?

Out of the box, Macs can read and write their own filesystems (APFS, HFS+), FAT32, and exFAT. They can read NTFS volumes, but cannot write to them, without the aid of third-party filesystem drivers.

Windows can handle NTFS, FAT32, and exFAT – but can't even read APFS or HFS+ without third-party drivers.