Changing permission on the ".trashes" directory?

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Changing permission on the ".trashes" directory?

Hi there,

My friend just upgraded her computer to OSX 10.4.8. We were trying to buy her space on her laptop by temporarily moving her music files to my hard drive via direct firewire transfer. I went through her HD:Users:Hername:Music:iTunes:iTunes Music:
folder and copied half her library to my computer, then moved those files from her machine into the trash and emptied the trash.

When we booted up her laptop again, the files were definitely gone from the folder on her hard drive, but the hard drive did not indicate it had any more free space available after the purge, despite those missing files (MANY gigs worth!). Even stranger, iTunes still had all of the deleted songs in the library, and was still able to play them even though the files were gone from the folder.

According to iTunes, the files are now located in a mysterious and hidden ".trashes" folder, for which we can't seem to obtain permission from the computer to access or modify via Terminal or via the Finder. There is only 1 user account on this machine. We can't figure out why we aren't able to see what's in this hidden ".trashes" folder, or why we can't change permission.

Any thoughts?

Many thanks in advance for any help you might be able to offer.

-A & C

PowerBook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Posted on Nov 1, 2006 4:33 PM

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Answer 1

Nov 1, 2006 6:12 PM in response to geekUSA

".Trashes" is lind of a limbo where mounted disk trash is moved to. Did you delete those music files from another Mac?

Permissions on ".Trashes" here is 755. Try this Terminal command:

sudo rm ~/.Trashes/*

What happened?

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Answer 2

geekUSA Author

Level 1

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Nov 1, 2006 7:05 PM in response to Gnarlodious

Hi,

Thanks for replying.

All I get is this:

tcsh: sudo: No match.

mind you, I essentially have no idea what I'm doing with the Terminal... All I know is what I've taught myself today.

Any more suggestions? Basically we're just trying to get the files back out of this weird "limbo" folder. Is there another way to do that without changing permission on it?

Cheers,

A & C

PowerBook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.8)

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Answer 3

Nov 1, 2006 8:57 PM in response to geekUSA

Hmmm... you are using the tcsh shell while I am using the bash shell. I don't know what that error meassage means.

Try all these commands to get in the invisible folder:

cd .Trashes

If that works, you may see a Terminal prompt looking like this:

~/.Trashes>

If it doesn't work, stop now! (because the next command is dangerouus)

Try a file listing:

ls -al

You may now see your missing files and/or folders. If so, delete them like this:

rm -r *

Does that break iTune's connection to the songs?

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Answer 4

Niel

Level 10

742,235 points

Nov 1, 2006 9:37 PM in response to geekUSA

The .Trashes folder stores the trash on disks which don't contain the home folder of the account logged in after all symbolic links in the path(if any) are resolved, and exists at the top level of each disk; by default, this will be all local disks except for the startup disk. It is mode 333 by default.

To navigate to individual items inside this folder, choose Go to Folder from the Finder's Go menu and enter /Volumes/volumename/.Trashes/501/ where 501 is your account's numeric UID. The Finder will report that the folder wasn't found if you enter the wrong number regardless of whether or not there is actually a folder at this location. The folders in here are owned by the UID in their names, and are mode 700 by default.

The .Trash folder lives inside an account's home folder, and allows full access to the account which owns the home folder it is inside by default.

(17461)

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