How to delete stubborn acrobat user data file?

[Europe calling]

HI,
I'm cleaning up my external HD (not my startup disk), and want to remove some old backed up stuff. I have a particular stubborn folder 'Acrobat User Data' that i cannot get into the trash.
I get an error stating: 'The operation cannot be completed because the item "8.0_x86" is in use. 😡
Anyone knows how to force delete this sort of stuff in OSX 10.5.8?

(By the way, i tried to upload a pic of the error window but choosing a file as attachment does'nt seem to work in Safari?)

 

[electroshock]

HI,
I'm cleaning up my external HD (not my startup disk), and want to remove some old backed up stuff. I have a particular stubborn folder 'Acrobat User Data' that i cannot get into the trash.
I get an error stating: 'The operation cannot be completed because the item "8.0_x86" is in use. 😡
Anyone knows how to force delete this sort of stuff in OSX 10.5.8?

(By the way, i tried to upload a pic of the error window but choosing a file as attachment does'nt seem to work in Safari?)

Hmm. Try quitting all Acrobat-related tools including Safari then try again to trash that file.

If that doesn't work, fire up Terminal and run:

$ lsof | grep -i acrobat

to see if it might identify a process holding it hostage in memory. If so, kill -9 the process ID (2nd column in lsof output).

Another thing to try:

$ ls -lO <path to file>

...and see if it mentions anything in the flags column.(5th). If it does, you may need to do 'sudo chflags no<flag> "<path to file>"'

One last thing to try is:

$ sudo rm -f "<path to file>"

ie:

$ sudo rm -f "/Volumes/ExtHD/Acrobat User Data"

(the double quotes is needed because the filename would have spaces in it.)

 

[Mycatisbigfoot]

restart you're computer then try

 

[Europe calling]

@Mycatisbigfoot: i restarted but it did'nt help.

@electroshock: i'm not a unix/terminal guy. It seems you know a solution, but this gets to technical for my knowledge and i'm not keen on messing around in terminal. That's not why i bought a mac. In the good old days you could hold 'option' and then force delete the trash. I was hoping there would be a similar solution 🙁

 

[sommls]

@Mycatisbigfoot: i restarted but it did'nt help.

@electroshock: i'm not a unix/terminal guy. It seems you know a solution, but this gets to technical for my knowledge and i'm not keen on messing around in terminal. That's not why i bought a mac. In the good old days you could hold 'option' and then force delete the trash. I was hoping there would be a similar solution 🙁

Could I suggest just giving it a try? That is one of the current glories of the terminal application. After informed consideration of the process and possible consequences, there are few things more satisfying than being able to delete an offending file with extreme prejudice.