I really messed up...

[Heather]

😱 I accidently dumped about 600 jpegs on the desktop at one time. Now these jpegs have piled up on my HD icon and taken complete control of my finder. Relaunching the finder does nothing, and even when I did a hard shut down when I logged back on the jpegs were back to their same ol' tricks. I can do anything not involving the finder (like typing this post), but as far as getting into the hard drive, shutting down, sleeping, deleting the damn files or anything like that, I am helpless as a baby. My hard drive has been spinning over time for the last couple hours and there doesn't seem to be anything I can do about it. 🙁
Help!

 

[realityisterror]

So you have no control of the Finder?

Well, what do you want to do with them? Both moving and deleting all of them is an easy task via the Terminal.

If you want to move all .jpg's on the Desktop to a folder called "junk" inside of your "pictures" folder for example:
mv ~/Desktop/*.jpg ~/Pictures/junk/

If you're fine with just deleting all of them:
rm -r ~/Desktop/*.jpg

Good luck

 

[jsw]

Just to be clear - to open Terminal, go to your Applications->Utilities folder or type ⌘-spacebar, then type in "Terminal" and click the first thing.

And I'd recommend against using that second command. Too easy to mistype and delete the wrong files if you're not careful.

 

[thejadedmonkey]

Just to be clear - to open Terminal, go to your Applications->Utilities folder or type ⌘-spacebar, then type in "Terminal" and click the first thing.

And I'd recommend against using that second command. Too easy to mistype and delete the wrong files if you're not careful.

Wouldn't getting to terminal involve using the finder?

 

[Heather]

Thanks for the replies. I was able to access the terminal through launchbar, but the commands don't do anything. It is like the jpegs are just frozen on my desktop. I can't move them, highlight them, or anything like that. They are officially a part of my desktop picture. 😕
Any other ideas?

 

[jsw]

First, if you can go back into Terminal, type:

ls ~/Desktop

and see if they're really there. If they aren't, a reboot (or, likely, log out/log in) should do the trick. If they are, we need to check the commands you typed. Please report back. 🙂

 

[realityisterror]

Hmm... I hesitate to recommend this... but...

Boot up in single user mode (hold Command-S at start up)

At the prompt type the same command with absolute paths:

mv /Users/username/Desktop/*.jpg /Users/username/Pictures/junk/

Then type:
reboot

Just be very careful, and perhaps wait to see if anyone else has any suggestions less potentially dangerous 😱

 

[angelneo]

If you have a second Mac and a firewire, you can try booting your desktop into hard disk mode (press "T" while booting), connect it to your second computer, use your second computer to go into the desktop's hard disk, look for your desktop and delete all the images.

 

[Heather]

To JSW: Thanks for your idea. I tried it and yes, they are all there. I have already tried rebooting (hard shut down is the only way I could do it), and it didn't help at all.
To realityisterror: Thanks for the idea. I will keep it in mind if all else fails🙂
To angelneo: I don't have a second mac.

I am just going to ride it out for now. Maybe my mac will finish the task in a few hours, or a few years...🙄

 

[Heather]

Thanks!

realityisterror, it turns out that your suggestion was on the money. What I didn't do last time I typed in the command was verify that I wanted to override the placement of the jpeg on my desktop... for every single jpeg. So basically I had to agree to override for every one of over 600 jpegs, but after that everything went back to normal and I shall never make this mistake again. Thanks so much to all of you for your ideas 😎 😎

 

[dextertangocci]

Wouldn't getting to terminal involve using the finder?

Um, no, if you are familiar with 10.4, you would know that there is something called spotlight😀

 

[annk]

Um, no, if you are familiar with 10.4, you would know that there is something called spotlight😀

Or do what jsw suggested:

...or type ⌘-spacebar, then type in "Terminal" and click the first thing.