empty trash in Mountain Lion

Go to Trash and select Finder > Secure Empty Trash

Well this will be bit complicated to determine. But there is some file in there you can't delete because it is either a system file of someone else's. Therefore I don't know of anyway to check other than checking one at a time by clicking on the file then going file get info and another window will populate with all the credentials for that file at the very bottom if the permissions for that file and if you don't have permission your name will not appear in this list. If it doesn't you will need to unlock it and then add permission for your user as a user

I have the same problem.

I checked the permissions of the files in Trash and correspond to my user, both user and group ids.

I also repaired permissions through the disk utility, but the problem persisted.

A "sudo rm" from shell solves the problem, but it is rather annoying to have to pass through shell for this.

Also I wonder whether there are any other broken permissions around the system.

Hi

Try the very basic first, Repair Disk Permission then restart the mac, see if you still have problem trashing.

Cheers

Ahem,

It did work very well.

Something slightly alaming and that I had never seen before happened immediately after however.

When I reloaded, the mac was convinced that the hard disk was 100% full. It started throwing alarms complaining about this and slowed down (maybe it was swapping like crazy).

I noticed that when this happened the disk utility signaled the disk storage histogram as 100% "Other" (the yellow bar).

A further restart fixed this too and now it seems nothing has ever happened.

Thanks anyway!

I was having that problem with Lion – I thought that by updating to Mountain Lion it'd go away. What I did was restore from my a TM backup, and tah-dah.

If you open the trash can in finder, press 'securely empty trash button in finder window while holding ctrl+alt key. That should allow you to delete anything in trash.

There is no "alt' key on my Mac keyboard.

ther is. its Alt/Option

Ahhh, so it is!

Thank you! This worked for me and, thankfully, I can now empty the trash can.

Thanks. This was the third tip I found in my search this morning, and it did the trick. Device X1, you are my new favorite person.😝

Didn't work for me.... I can't empty the trash, I can't turn off file sharing, I can't copy files between my HD and my external HD... and now I can't leave work until I figure it out!