Help - desktop in trash refuse to be moved back out.

[mcadam]

My phone calls and it's my (pc-centric) friend Kasper. He's on msn with his girlfriend in Switzerland and she's panicking. She's just accidentally moved her desktop (including everything on it off course) to the trash. She's also trashed Skype (might have been on desktop?!?). And now she can't move it back out again!

Unfortunately I'm not the master of Macs that Kasper hopes and I've no idea what to do about this except try to restart. To calm his girlfriend down I've told him to tell her that I'll be back in 30 min. with expert advice from Macrumors... So, what advice should I pass on to him to her?

Thanks for your attention, hope you can help (the very honor of all things Mac and Macrumor is at stake here... well, only in the eyes of Kasper, so we'll probably manage).


A

 

[mad jew]

From memory she should be able to restart and then drag them all back out of there but maybe wait for someone smart to verify that because a restart may also be a bad thing.

Also, I don't suppose she's tried dragging things out separately? I don't understand why a standard file would be stuck in the trash except for maybe if the permissions were corrupt, and you know what that means, they'll wanna be repaired.

 

[ElectricSheep]

The Terminal is your best friend.

Open up the Terminal application. Its in the Utilities folder, which is inside the Applications folder.

When a new terminal window appears, you will be presented with what is called a command prompt. Depending on how your system is set up, it could a short string of text terminated with a $ and then a flashing cursor awaiting textual command input.

First, we are going to make sure we are in the right working directory. Type in the following command (don't worry, you won't set anything on fire or cause a huge explosion if you mis-type this command. Its fairly benign.)

cd ~

You probably won't see any output when you hit enter after typing in the command. Don't worry about it, that's normal.

Next, we are going make sure we don't have any existing Desktop. Type in the following and hit enter:

ls -ld Desktop

This time, we'll get some output. If you see the following line:

ls: Desktop: No such file or directory

Then cool beans. On the other hand, if you see this line (or something like it):

drwx------   5 shortusername  shortusername  170 Nov 12 18:38 Desktop

That means that at some point, the Desktop folder was re-created by the system. But, its not the desktop folder that you want. You want the one you moved to the trash. So, lets move this Desktop folder out of the way:

mv Desktop Not_My_Desktop

Right, now we are ready to recover the Desktop that is sitting in the trash. Type the following command:

mv .Trash/Desktop .

Yes, those are periods. Hit enter, and Presto! Your old Desktop folder moves right back to where it was. Log out and log back in for the Finder to refresh all this (it can be a little slow).

 

[FocusAndEarnIt]

The Terminal is your best friend...

Excellent job ElectricSheep. I was going to say the exact same thing... not. [/sarcasm]

 

[mcadam]

30 min. 3 replies - the honor of Macrumors has certainly been firmly upheld, hehe.

Ehe, mad jew - when I'd submitted my question, I wen't and looked to see if you were onboard. And so were, so I made a little bet with myself that you'd be the first one to answer You need to get out more (me, my pb and quite a few others are rather happy that you don't).

Yes, she's managed to move all files from the desktop out seperately. But the desktop itself is not working and still stuck.

However the advice of ElectricSheep seems very, very promising. So she should just follow your instructions exactly, getting all the spaces in front of periods and so on exactly correct (to make sure her iBook doesn't implode when she hits enter). Brilliant

Thank you so much to all of you.

A

 

[FocusAndEarnIt]

I hope all goes well and no flaming iBooks

 

[deeceegee]

You Saved Me!!!!

The Terminal is your best friend.

Open up the Terminal application. Its in the Utilities folder, which is inside the Applications folder.

When a new terminal window appears, you will be presented with what is called a command prompt. Depending on how your system is set up, it could a short string of text terminated with a $ and then a flashing cursor awaiting textual command input.

First, we are going to make sure we are in the right working directory. Type in the following command (don't worry, you won't set anything on fire or cause a huge explosion if you mis-type this command. Its fairly benign.)

cd ~

You probably won't see any output when you hit enter after typing in the command. Don't worry about it, that's normal.

Next, we are going make sure we don't have any existing Desktop. Type in the following and hit enter:

ls -ld Desktop

This time, we'll get some output. If you see the following line:

ls: Desktop: No such file or directory

Then cool beans. On the other hand, if you see this line (or something like it):

drwx------   5 shortusername  shortusername  170 Nov 12 18:38 Desktop

That means that at some point, the Desktop folder was re-created by the system. But, its not the desktop folder that you want. You want the one you moved to the trash. So, lets move this Desktop folder out of the way:

mv Desktop Not_My_Desktop

Right, now we are ready to recover the Desktop that is sitting in the trash. Type the following command:

mv .Trash/Desktop .

Yes, those are periods. Hit enter, and Presto! Your old Desktop folder moves right back to where it was. Log out and log back in for the Finder to refresh all this (it can be a little slow).