Ticket Options

Question Profile

Question Details

TICKET ARCHIVE -> Cant empty trash for external drive?

jocus20 - Jan 12, 2007 - 4:27 pm

Im having trouble deleting unwanted apps on my external drive. Ive moved the unwanted applications to the trash but everytime i try and empty the trash it never seems to work. Usually the preparing to empty trash window just freezes up and will not procede to empty the trash. I have quite a few files on there that i want to delete so i dont know if that has anything to do with it. Thanks for any of your help.

stottm - Jan 13, 2007 - 10:25 am

DANGER !!! What follows is hazardous be sure to follow the directions EXACTLY!!! I am providing you with dangerous information. Just be careful.
PRINT THIS EMAIL AND READ ALL THE DIRECTIONS PROVIDED BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING!

If you don't feel comfortable performing these steps then by all means just delete the trash normally and wait for it to finish. It is likely just really slow, especially if it's a lot of files and you are not using an external firewire drive but a USB drive. The speed difference between firewire and USB is like night vs. day.

Deleting a user's Trash forcefully from the Terminal Unix Prompt:
-------------------------------------------------------

1. Open the Terminal application /Applications/Utilities/Terminal
2. Change directories to the .Trash/ folder in your home folder first.

i.e. 'cd .Trash/' (case sensitive and without the quotes)

3. Type 'ls -lh' (without the quotes) to list the files in the Trash.
4. Make absolutely sure these are the files you wish to delete and that you are in the right location. You should see the prompt listing your computer name followed by ~/.Trash username$.
5. Once you are absolutely positively sure you are in the right location you can now delete the files on the next step.

WARNING!!! There is NO Undelete and NO going back after step 6 below. If you are in the wrong folder/directory you WILL delete stuff you may care about including your entire hard disk if you do this in the wrong place.
BE VERY VERY CAREFUL!!!

6. 'rm -rf *' (without quotes) - This will delete all files from the directory you are in to any sub-directories contained within along with the subdirectories themselves and it will do so forcefully and quickly. When the prompt returns it's done. It may take some time to delete a lot of files but it should be much faster then doing it from the Mac OS X trash can.

These above instructions will empty the local home directory trash. The external disk has it's own trash location. You will need to change directories from the Terminal to the external disk. Here's an example: (remove the quotes around the actual commands)

'cd /Volumes/CRUZERMINI/.Trashes/501'

That's my external Cruzer Mini Flash drive, works the same for other drives. Substitute CRUZERMINI for the volume name of your disk. Note pressing TAB will autocomplete the folder/directory and files names. Type the first part of the name and press TAB.

My prompt now looks like this:
ComputerName:/Volumes/CRUZERMINI/.Trashes/501 username$

'ls -lh' - Means list files in long format with human readable sizes

Looks like this:
-rwxrwxrwx 1 user user 111K Aug 6 1999 SERVICE.INS*
-rwxrwxrwx 1 user user 126K Mar 26 1999 SETUP.BMP*
-rwxrwxrwx 1 user user 44K Oct 16 1997 SETUP.EXE*
-rwxrwxrwx 1 user user 4K Jul 27 1999 SETUP.INI*
-rwxrwxrwx 1 user user 92K Jul 16 1999 SETUP.INS*

'rm -rf *' - Means remove all files recursively and force the removal. This is a dangerous command. If you ran this from the root of your main hard disk or the root of your external disk by mistake it will certainly erase everything you have permission to erase. BE CAREFUL!!!