Problem deleting backups

I was attempting to delete backups for my MacBook Pro off of TimeMachine from my external hard drive. Some of the backups are well over two years old. Since there were so many (well over a 100) and rather than deleting them one at a time, I thought I'd take a different route.

BIG MISTAKEI thought I would speed up the process by dragging the backups from my external hard drive to my iMac which has more memory into the Trash on that computer. First of all because there were so many files, it was taking forever. Then when it started to delete, I continued to get multiple messages that files were locked. So, I stopped the process.

Now I can't empty the Trash from Finder or the Terminal.

Below is the text from the Terminal.

ast login: Sun Oct 4 16:30:26 on console

MacBook-Pro:~ tonibellimac$ sudo rm -rf~/.Trash/*

We trust you have received the usual lecture from the local System

Administrator. It usually boils down to these three things:

#1) Respect the privacy of others.

#2) Think before you type.

#3) With great power comes great responsibility.

Password:

Sorry, try again.

Password:

rm: illegal option -- ~

usage: rm [-f | -i] [-dPRrvW] file ...

unlink file

MacBook-Pro:~ tonibellimac$ sudo rm -rf ~/.Trash/*

MacBook-Pro:~ tonibellimac$

MacBook-Pro:~ tonibellimac$ rm -rf

I've also tried dragging the backups from the Trash back to the external hard drive. But I get the same message, "The operation can’t be completed because backup items can’t be modified."

So, what can I do at this point?

Need help!

Thank you.

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