Can't empty trash - Extreme Edition

[kirkbross]

Before you direct me to all the terminal commands for nuking the trash, I've done them all, including the most nuclear of all... rm -rf ~/.Trash.

There is still one item that won't go away. Attached is a screenshot because the folder contains a zillion nested image subfolders I never created. I'm hoping that might be a clue.

I think this happened when I was doing some house cleaning and permission repairs but I'm not sure what I did. I was deleting some large website directories with many thousands of items in different user accounts and on different boot volumes. Somehow this one folder got stuck... not sure if it was from another account that got trashed into this account, but there are no items in the other accounts' trash cans.

Any suggestions?

 

[GGJstudios]

If you haven't already done so, begin by restarting your Mac. That resolves many problems with deleting files. For problems deleting items or emptying the trash, you may find some useful ideas here:

• You can't empty the Trash or move a file to the Trash
• Solving Trash Problems
• Can't move files to trash
• Can't Empty Trash on a Mac
• Trash It!

 

[kirkbross]

If you haven't already done so, begin by restarting your Mac. That resolves many problems with deleting files. For problems deleting items or emptying the trash, you may find some useful ideas here:

• You can't empty the Trash or move a file to the Trash
• Solving Trash Problems
• Can't move files to trash
• Can't Empty Trash on a Mac
• Trash It!

Alas, none of the solutions offered in any of those articles emptied my trash.

 

[Brian Y]

Are you sure it's in your home directory? Do you have any external disks connected?

Have you checked the /.Trashes folder (you will need sudo to ls it) - e.g.

sudo ls /.Trashes/

 

[kirkbross]

Are you sure it's in your home directory? Do you have any external disks connected?

Have you checked the /.Trashes folder (you will need sudo to ls it) - e.g.

sudo ls /.Trashes/

Yes and it shows it as being an empty directory.

 

[kirkbross]

SOLVED:

It appears the stubborn directory inside my trash was in an old boot volume, but appearing in my current trash can. Further it was in a hidden folder called 505.

So... I had to cd into that directory and then run a sudo rm -rf *

Volumes/OLD_BOOT_VOLUME/.Trashes/505/directory_that_wouldnt_delete

Why that was appearing in the trash can of my current boot volume I do not know.

 

[davidlv]

SOLVED:

It appears the stubborn directory inside my trash was in an old boot volume, but appearing in my current trash can. Further it was in a hidden folder called 505.

So... I had to cd into that directory and then run a sudo rm -rf *

Volumes/OLD_BOOT_VOLUME/.Trashes/505/directory_that_wouldnt_delete

Why that was appearing in the trash can of my current boot volume I do not know.

Run Disk Warrior on your current boot volume (while booted from a different volume), you may have some directory corruption. ???? Not sure, so just a suggestion.

 

[John T]

Run Disk Warrior on your current boot volume (while booted from a different volume), you may have some directory corruption. ???? Not sure, so just a suggestion.

Disk Warrior? What's wrong with Disc Utility!!

 

[chown33]

SOLVED:

It appears the stubborn directory inside my trash was in an old boot volume, but appearing in my current trash can. Further it was in a hidden folder called 505.

So... I had to cd into that directory and then run a sudo rm -rf *

Volumes/OLD_BOOT_VOLUME/.Trashes/505/directory_that_wouldnt_delete

Why that was appearing in the trash can of my current boot volume I do not know.

Every volume has a .Trashes folder at its root. This then holds per-user trash folders, named by user ID. These are for use when the volume is NOT the startup disk, which means they're in addition to the trash folder in your user-account's home folder.

If you have an external disk connected (you do), and your user ID matches a directory in that disk's .Trashes folder (I don't know), then the contents of that user-specific folder will appear as "your trash" (apparently, it did). Given the facts of the situation, I would surmise that your user ID is 505. The easy way to confirm this is to type this command into a Terminal window, then press the RETURN key:

id

The output should list your user ID (uid=STUFF_HERE), among other things.

Also note that because the per-volume .Trashes folder resides on the external disk, if you have files in the trash on that volume, and you then eject the external disk, your trash will "become empty", even though the files on external disk have not been deleted. If you then reconnect the external disk, your trash will "become not empty", because the Finder/Dock sees a new disk with a trash folder that belongs to you.

All the above is normal, and happens all the time, even when you don't have weird unremovable stuff in an external disk's trash. That is, except for the weird stuff in the external trash, the Finder and Dock were behaving normally.

----------

Run Disk Warrior on your current boot volume (while booted from a different volume), you may have some directory corruption. ???? Not sure, so just a suggestion.

That doesn't make sense. The weird stuff was on an external disk, not the boot disk. So if there's directory corruption, it's far more likely to be on the external disk than on the boot disk, because that's the file-system where the weird stuff actually resided.

A "Verify Disk" using Disk Utility on the external disk can't hurt. But it needs to happen on the external disk. Nothing I've seen in this thread suggests boot disk corruption.

 

[kirkbross]

Every volume has a .Trashes folder at its root. .../

Thanks for the detailed explanation... very helpful to know the nitty gritty.

 

[coldjeanzzz]

I don't know why but that screenshot made me laugh

 

[kirkbross]

I don't know why but that screenshot made me laugh

It's like it got into a feedback loop of creating images folders...