emptying trash negative items to delete

idonotliketostu said:

i wanted deleting around 450,000 items, as it counted down to 0, it went into the negatives? WHAT?

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I vote bug, and thank you for not making this thread a poll

I am having this problem as well on a new Lion install. I'm trying to delete my old Time Machine backups from Snow Leopard. Currently at -90,000!

Is it a bug in the sense that Finder has not calculated correctly the number of files in the Trash?

The Finder of Mac OS 9.0.4 had a similar bug, IIRC. An update fixed it.

The counter value is probably not large enough (SInt16 for example), and overflows. A classic (ha, ha, ha) programming error. Obviously still present in the OS X 10.7.0 Finder.

*ROTFLMAO*

It caused by "hardlinks" which use f.e. timemaschine... Items looks like many, but are the same.

Yeah, I got this the other day!

I was gonna post too, but then forgot!

At least it's reassuring to know that I'm not alone with this problem.

As a stopgap solution I found that stopping and restarting deletion (several times) eventually returned things to normal and finalised the operation.

This is happening to me now and I'm already past -394,500 ... for those of you this also happened to, did it finish eventually and it's just the counter issue as proposed earlier in the thread or did it just keep doing this until you stopped it?

I'm stuck in the same boat here, -100,000 and counting. Any tips?

It does finish eventually.

You might stop the deletion process (press the X at the right of the progress bar) and re-start it again. All deleted items stay deleted, and the counter will recalculate the value from the current amount of deleted items.

I'm at -351,000 and it's still going strong. The total empty trash command has been running for 3-4 hours now at least. I did cancel it once and restart (somewhere around -250,000) and it's still here. Mind you I'm removing 6-8 months of time machine.

I'm comforted to know that it will eventually stop, but it's still the most bizarre bug to see, especially from an apple product.

I went to sleep after it had past ~520,000 in the negative and by morning it was all clear. However, the trash still appears with contents, so I've tried to empty it several times and it pretty much does the same thing: it counts up to ~80, asked for me to remove only unlocked items or all items, makes the empty trash sound, but it still has stuff in it (the same stuff as before). I've repeated this cycle 3-4 times now. The only way I can get the trash to fully go away is to unplug the firewire to my drobo.

mcs37 said:

The only way I can get the trash to fully go away is to unplug the firewire to my drobo.

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the only way i found to delete these files is to go into terminal, and cd into the external drive

cd /Volumes/Drivename/.Trashes/501/
sudo rm -rl -v *

the -v is so it scrolls by as it deletes stuff.

that should remove all the files in the external drive's trash folder, therefore removing it from your local machine's trash bin.

frustrating. took me hours before i figured it out. if you want to see the exact path, command i on the files in the trash to see the full path.

let me know if that helps.

mcs37 said:

I went to sleep after it had past ~520,000 in the negative and by morning it was all clear. However, the trash still appears with contents, so I've tried to empty it several times and it pretty much does the same thing: it counts up to ~80, asked for me to remove only unlocked items or all items, makes the empty trash sound, but it still has stuff in it (the same stuff as before). I've repeated this cycle 3-4 times now. The only way I can get the trash to fully go away is to unplug the firewire to my drobo.

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Restart btw, I had this issue, restarted after doing the big push, emptied again and it did it all fine.

mcs37 said:

asked for me to remove only unlocked items or all items, makes the empty trash sound, but it still has stuff in it

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time machine backups back up EVERYTHING, including operating system files!! as a safety the OSX has some special BLOCKED files that you aren't able to delete easily. This is stuff the computer needs to run, or has important settings and data and normally shouldn't be deleted. as far as the trash is concerned, the files you are throwing away is the original, and it doesn't want you to mess something up. But ou are a bit smarter than the trash, you know it's a time machine backup, and the originals are still safe on your computer, so next time you empty the trash empty ALL items (INCLUDING blocked ones) it may ask for a password, this should rid the hdd of those last 80 items. I'm sure the terminal trick valter posted will work as well, but I always just tell it to also remove blocked files, its much easier

I went through this last night. I wound up stopping the process a few times and then starting it again. When it was finally done it still showed trash to be emptied.

I had to hold down option when emptying the trash and it finally emptied.

I have deleted a good amount of files and seen this before, but it sorts itself out or always seems to. only does it with large files.

seems to me lions just aren't very accurate and are horrible counters.

bdodds1985 said:

I have deleted a good amount of files and seen this before, but it sorts itself out or always seems to. only does it with large files.

seems to me lions just aren't very accurate and are horrible counters.

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It's not just Lion, I've had it since Leopard tbh.

Schtumple said:

It's not just Lion, I've had it since Leopard tbh.

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you couldnt just spell it out? i had to google tbh for that?

bdodds1985 said:

you couldnt just spell it out? i had to google tbh for that?

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1st world problem.

Schtumple said:

1st world problem.

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lol. smh. seriously.

bdodds1985 said:

lol. smh. seriously.
Image

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I had to google smh, so there, now we're both equal.

Fix

Go to Terminal and type rm -rf then drag the files you need to delete into terminal then press enter. if it doesn't let you type sudo rm -rf then drag the files in press enter and type in your password and press enter again and it will delete all files after a few minutes depending on how much it is.

simple way if it works for you

reformat the drive with the trashes
then trash empties very easily
i was able to do this since i was setting up a new time machine drive and had no use for the older material