How do I get rid of ".Trashes"?

Hi devinwe,

Windows always immediately deletes items from any removable media. The Mac OS does not. They do have a common method of creating an invisible Trash folder on each fixed volume attached. Meaning all internal and external hard drives.

Where Macs and Windows differ is that the Mac OS creates these Trash folders on all storage devices, making it possible for you to always pull something back out of the trash. So when you put something in the trash of your Jump Drive on the Mac, you then have to empty the trash to remove it, just as you would with any hard drive.

Any file or folder that begins with a period is invisible on the Mac. This is common to pretty much any Unix OS, over which OS X is built. Windows doesn't care about this rule, so you see any files in Windows that you wouldn't when viewing the drive on the Mac. You can delete them if you want, the Mac will simply recreate them every time you use it there.

A .DS_Store file is what OS X uses to remember the size, viewing option and position of a folder window. It hurts nothing to delete them, except that the window it belongs to will revert to a default display the next time it's opened.

On the Mac (as well as PCs by default) you have to empty the trash to free up space. I just click and hold the trash icon and a choice to Empty Trash appears.

Hmm, it should. I tested it again just to be sure and I have no problem deleting the .Trashes folder as many times as I want in Windows. Putting the flash drive back on the Mac recreates the folder and I can then again delete it on the Windows box. I can also open the .Trashes folder from Windows like any other folder and delete individual items.

I'm assuming you have Windows set to view invisible files and folders? Otherwise you wouldn't see the .Trashes folder there, either. Anyway, you should be able to just drag and drop the .Trashes folder, or any items within to the Recycle Bin.

Well yeah I can delete it in Windows, but how do I get rid of it on my Mac? My point is I don't want to have to use Windows.

Oh. You can't, nor is there any reason to keep trying to remove the hidden .Trashes folder. If you want to clear the space taken up by items in the trash, just empty it before you dismount the Jump Drive. Any files or folders in the trash will be deleted.

The Mac OS won't let you delete the .Trashes folder because it's considered a protected system item. But as I said, you don't need to be concerned that it's there. Once you empty the trash in the normal method, the empty .Trashes folder on the Jump Drive will only take up a few kbytes of space.

A note on the Trash for the Mac OS. Like Windows, you only see one trash bin even though it represents a collection of any and all trash bins on all mounted drives. So when you empty it, all trash folders are emptied. Meaning if you only intended to empty the trash on the Jump Drive, that won't happen. Anything in the trash of your hard drive will also be deleted. But this is no different from how Windows behaves.

Well, it is a problem for this person in the iPhoto board:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=714083&tstart=0

Some of these LCD Picture frames simply cycle through the files and choke on non-picture items. Bad design, I know, but I assume the only way to delete .Trashes is with terminal?

Hi Keith,

If I'm reading it correctly, Sheri isn't actually having a problem deleting the files, just wondering where all those "extra" non picture files are coming from. On just about all digital cameras, the format they are in is DOS/Windows. When you copy files to such a drive (flash drive, camera flash card) the Mac OS wants to create an extra file to store the resource fork data, which can't be done directly on a PC formatted drive. So in the case of a file named picture.jpg, OS X also creates a file named ._picture.jpg. That file holds the resource fork data. When you copy the actual .jpg back to your hard drive on the Mac, it automatically recombines the resource fork data.

So what Sheri seems to be upset with is all of the ._ filename files OS X creates when copying images onto her SD memory stick, thinking that they're an image of some sort when they aren't.

Almost. The .Trashes folder itself will remain on the Jump Drive. Any files you had put into the trash will be deleted.

Which is just as bad, since that will choke the LCD frame.

Hmm, I guess the terminal is the only option.