The operation can’t be completed because you don’t have permission to access some of the items.

Click on the folder contaiing the files and control click on it, choose Get info > under permissions unlock the pad lock, and set permissions to read and write. Click on the gear below and set to all inside.

Then try to delete.

There seems to be some confusion here, Are you talking about regular files stored on a Time Capsule or are you talking about Time Machine backup files?

I don;t have a Time Capsule but do have a Airport Express with a drive connected to its USB port. In my setup the drive appears as a shared volume and when I delete something from that drive I get a message saying that the item will be deleted immediately. Shared volumes do not have a .Trash folder and so items deleted from them are gone as soon as you confirm.

Is this how the Time Capsule had been behaving also before the problem starting happening?

Try these and see if any of this works...

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1526

Open Terminal in Utilities and copy/paste in

ls -aleO

leave a space and drag in one of those files. Then please post the output of Terminal.

Besides ordinary Permissions, there are Access Control Lists. This should show whether there are any ACLs involved here or not.

Also, see Pondini on deleting TM backups.

http://pondini.org/TM/12.html

I don't think you should be trying to selectively delete any files from TM via the finder. You should carefully read through the Pondini link I gave you above. And forget about the Terminal command I gave you. That really doesn't apply here.

But I know very little about TM, since I don't use it. I'll try to get some help for this.

Did you copy the folder in the Finder or with Time Machine?

Assuming these are not Time Machine backups, OSX may be sending the wrong message -- the files may be locked instead of having a permissions problem. I've seen that before on network drives.

Select one, control-click (right-click) it, select Get Info, and see if the little Locked box in the General section is checked. If it is, remove the check and try again.

I just want to thank all of you who posted the solution to the problem "The operation can’t be completed because you don’t have permission to access some of the items.". I have to say I've been lazy about finding the answer but I've been struggling with this for several months now and finally I Googled the message. Boy am I happy it's resolved now. You all are fantastic. 😁

I have spent more than 3 hours searching for an answer to a similar problem.

I was saving an important 20GB Folder with 13,590 items from a previous 3 year old MacBook Pro as data folder into my Airport Time Capsule, also about 3 years old (2nd generation I think) as I was having a lot of problems with the MBP. However, during the process, my MBP crashed and the transfer was incomplete. After I restarted the MBP, the Folder I copied into the Time Capsule is shown as a light shade text and when I click on this Folder it shows just a folder icon and not the contents of files and sub-folders in this Folder that may have been copied before the crash. Hence I tried to delete this folder and came out with the standard message. Same as dicussed here, under info, the folder is not locked. There is no lock key at the bottom below Sharing & Permission. And access highlighted is (unkownn), staff and everyone with read & Write privilege for all three.I tried to folow some of the procedures stated here and in other sites but without any success.

Can you assist. Thanks a million.

My solution - create an alias to the folder - then delete the files from within the alias!

Genius, thank you. Worked for me. I had a copy operation that got interrupted. Translucent folder that I couldn't open and when I tried to delete it I got the error. Made an alias was able to go inside the folder and unlock the items which allowed me to finally delete the folder.

I have exactly the same problem as you did.

Did you manage to solve this? How?