Error emptying trash

[thebart]

Don't remember when it started but every time I empty the trash, Finder tells me it can't because some process is using some file. Doesn't tell me which process and which files, of course. If I click Skip then it goes ahead and empties the trash successfully anyway

Doesn't matter what's in the trash. Could be one single file I just deleted as a test.

Already filed feedback.

If anyone else is seeing this, please file feedback too

 

[auxbuss]

I'm still on Sequoia, but this started happening to me yesterday. I'm pretty sure it happened to me before, years ago. But I can't recall the fix. Sorry. If I come up with anything, I'll report back.

 

[auxbuss]

Reporting back 🙂

I deleted ~/.Trash from the command line – it has deny delete everyone on it, so requires sudo – then logged out and in again, and all was good. macOS recreated the .Trash directory.

It's odd, because the .Trash folder's permissions are exactly the same now as before, so essentially nothing's changed.

 

[Starfia]

(Could it have been that the Trash contained a hidden file which was indeed being used by something?)

 

[auxbuss]

(Could it have been that the Trash contained a hidden file which was indeed being used by something?)

It wasn't in my case. I investigated from the command line, so dot-file would have been visible.

 

[bogdanw]

Sloth might be helpful.
"Sloth is a native Mac app that shows all open files, directories, sockets, pipes, and devices in use by all running processes on your system. This makes it easy to inspect which apps are using which files, etc."
https://github.com/sveinbjornt/Sloth
https://sveinbjorn.org/sloth

 

[NoBoMac]

^sounds like a fancy version of lsof command.

lsof might be sufficient. From a Terminal:

lsof | grep Trash

Or just run lsof and scroll the Terminal window to see all the output of the command.

Will list files in use, pathname, and part or all of the process/program/app/command in use.

Lots of options for the command, so can dial it in better, but hopefully, example will be sufficient.

Or: hold option key while doing "Empty Trash" (been ages since I've done this so WAG on my part).

Or: from Terminal:

sudo rm -rf ~/.Trash/*

 

[boppin]

sudo rm -rf ~/.Trash/*

Don't forget to restart after this.

Or you can try the app "Trash It!" Apple support told me to use this tool. 10 years ago or something like that. Can't remember.