Thank you sooooo much for all this info!!! I’m new to Mac and never knew much about terminal commands even on Windows. Also thanks for the info on screenshots. I guess you picked up on my lousy picture I took with my phone.🤣
I’m going to try this as soon as I get back on my computer tonight.
You’re welcome
. Commands on macOS are usually the same as on Linux, though there are some differences here and there. Now I am probably not representative of a typical user, but the Terminal is my favourite app, hehe.
If you’re interested, I’ll break down things a bit more to help you understand the command - it can be a slightly dangerous one if abused;
sudo = Superuser do. Anything that follows sudo will be run as root, requiring the administrator password. It may not be necessary to delete the file you want, but I added it to make sure it would get rid of it. You can try without sudo as well and see if it says permission denied.
rm = Remove. The Unix command for removing a file. It takes as input whatever you want to remove.
Dragging something from the Finder to the Terminal will write the path to the file or directory to where your cursor is in the Terminal, so it’s just a “shortcut” for writing the path yourself.
-r = The recursive flag for rm. Normally rm will only delete singular inputs. So if you point it to a package or directory that contains sub-elements, it will need the recursive flag to know you want to delete all su elements as well. If the flag is not set and you point it to a package or directory it won’t delete anything, but will just tell you - this is a security mechanism so you don’t accidentally delete more than you want.
Flags like this are set before the input, so it’d be
sudo rm -r <input>
If even this fails, you can also add the
-f flag, which is the “force” flag.
The reason I said this command can be a little dangerous is obviously since it deletes and can delete as root. Running
sudo rm -r -f /
will essentially say “as root, remove everything from the start of my computer and all the way through all subelements forcefully.
macOS has System Integrity Protection that would protect some core files, but it’d still remove a lot of your system.
So yeah, probably don’t run that one, hehe. But rm’ing a specific file or folder is fine and I do it all the time.
Also I wrote out both flags to make it fit with the explanation above, but if you have multiple flags you can combine them to make it a bit shorter like:
rm -rf <input>
And hey, the image was rather good for something taken with an external camera. Very easy to read everything, but just thought it’d be easier to have the screenshot straight on your machine
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