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Force Delete "in use" files

E

everest63

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 20, 2006
4
0
Hi,

Need to know if Force Delete 1.2 will delete files that are in use.

Let me explain. One of my family members opened iPhoto and wanted to copy a picture to the Mac OSX (10.4) desktop. Well, what she did not know was that she copied all 6,990 pictures to the desktop. Of course when this happened the hour glass spun forever and every few seconds a picture would show on the desktop. Knowing that it would take many many hours for that many pics to show (draw) on the desktop (also knowing the 768MB of memory would not support such an endeavorer) I shut down the iMac. I powered it back up and logged into my account and the process of placing all those .JPG files on the desktop started again. If I go into the Finder and navigate to the Desktop I can see all the .JPG files. If I drag a picture to the trash I get a File in Use by another process message. If I click OK the file gets deleted.
Need to know if Force Delete 1.2 is up for the task of deleting all 6,990 from the desktop and do so without getting that 'File in use......" message nag.
Or, is there a good Terminal command like SUDO RM --R........? that can be used to force delete all those files and not individually?

Andrew :)
 
everest63 said:
Hi,

Need to know if Force Delete 1.2 will delete files that are in use.

Let me explain. One of my family members opened iPhoto and wanted to copy a picture to the Mac OSX (10.4) desktop. Well, what she did not know was that she copied all 6,990 pictures to the desktop. Of course when this happened the hour glass spun forever and every few seconds a picture would show on the desktop. Knowing that it would take many many hours for that many pics to show (draw) on the desktop (also knowing the 768MB of memory would not support such an endeavorer) I shut down the iMac. I powered it back up and logged into my account and the process of placing all those .JPG files on the desktop started again. If I go into the Finder and navigate to the Desktop I can see all the .JPG files. If I drag a picture to the trash I get a File in Use by another process message. If I click OK the file gets deleted.
Need to know if Force Delete 1.2 is up for the task of deleting all 6,990 from the desktop and do so without getting that 'File in use......" message nag.
Or, is there a good Terminal command like SUDO RM --R........? that can be used to force delete all those files and not individually?

Andrew :)
Click to expand...

To remove ALL .jpg and .JPG files from your Desktop you can open Terminal (in Utilities) and paste in the following (and press return):

Code: 
rm -f ~/Desktop/*.jpg ~/Desktop/*.JPG

You may need to use

Code: 
sudo rm -f ~/Desktop/*.jpg ~/Desktop/*.JPG
 
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