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trash won't empty

Macbook

Lion

Internal 500GB Drive

Time Machine


Trash calcuates items to delete and hangs, any suggestions? Even left it over night and nothing.


Thanks in advance

MacBook, Mac OS X (10.7), MacBook, 16GB iPhone 4, 60GB 5G, iPad

Posted on Aug 15, 2011 7:07 PM

Reply
9 replies

Mar 6, 2014 7:43 AM in response to jpodraza

I couldn't get the CMD+ Right click Secure empty trash to work - I'm using a macbook pro -

BUT what DID work is to go into the Finder - Preferences - Advanced and tick off the Empty Trash Securely.

It is deleting - not hanging up. Yeah!


Question: When I did right click on the file in the trash - get info - the file was less than 1M in size for ONE file. Now that it is deleting it says that there are thousands of files. What is going on here??


Like TheSmokeMonster said there is something huge in there, but in my case it is hidden in ONE file. - ???


Thanks

Mar 6, 2014 8:36 AM in response to swriviera

Secure Empty will take forever. It's doing a 7 pass overwrite of the deleted items with random zeros and ones. That means it's doing this for every file 7 times!


Stop the Secure Empty and just do this, but read the instructions VERY carefully.


You must be 100% certain you have entered the command below EXACTLY as written. One typo and you could lose all the data in your user. Copy/paste only and TRIPLE check it's entered properly in Terminal. The -f option will force empty and delete immediately. No questions. (rm is remove/delete, -r is everything inside the folder, -f is force, no questions)


Copy/paste this command into Terminal, in Utilities. You will be asked for your admin password, which won't appear as you type it in. (If you have never used sudo before in Terminal, you will get a warning. Proceed anyway.) Then hit return.


sudo rm -rf ~/.Trash



There is a single space between sudo and rm

" rm and -rf

" -rf and ~/.Trash


NO SPACES IN ~/.Trash


It may take a while, depending on how many items are being deleted. You'll know it's done when you get a new $ sign prompt. Then log out and back in in order to get a new Trash folder.

trash won't empty

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