I have a few empty folders in my trash. They may be encrypted although there are no files within them.
I cannot get rid of them. Any ideas?
iMac, Mac OS X (10.3.x)
What exactly happens when you try to empty the Trash? If you haven't already done so, please log out or restart the computer and try again.
I've restarted 100 times and its still there. They may have come from an external hard drive with encryption. They are just folders with nothing in them. See dialog box that comes up when I try to delete. There are 4 folders. The "Santa Susana" is just one of them.
Hold down the Command key and click on the Trash bin to bring up the Secure Empty Trash option.
See if that will work.
Thanks Old Toad but Secure Empty Trash didn't work either. I tried using the demo version of iTrash and the application keeps quitting when I try to empty. Is there another application that will override these files?
I assume you have checked or repaired the disk using Disk Utility? I'm not sure I can help as I have seen this problem many times, but rebooting has always solved it for me.
Trash FAQ
Usual cause is that something running on your Mac is holding those files open, just as the message indicates.
For most applications that might do this, close all running applications, remove all startup items and log out and back into your Mac, or reboot it.
If that's what you've already done, and if that fails, then you can review the other startup items through various means, including with a tool such as Etrecheck. Alternatively, if you're comfortable with the command line, launch Terminal.app from Applications > Utilities, and issue the command
sudo lsof | grep -i "your-problem-filename-here"
for example:
sudo lsof | grep -i "Arial Italic.ttf"
will list the names of the processes and the process IDs with the specified (quoted, as it contains spaces) file open. This is unfortunately a little bit more arcane, and — once you have some information on the process — you might then need to launch Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor.app to locate the process with that process ID (PID), or some other similar tool.
There are other spots where applications can be started, and sometimes adware and malware can unfortunately be a problem for folks, and some of that dreck goes to some effort to try to hide itself. So if this isn't an innocent problem, then sometimes the culprit can be a little more difficult to locate. But the above is the usual and easy stuff...
How to delete encrypted files in trash
