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Mac is showing a warning before I empty the trash

A

alimccarley

macrumors newbie
Original poster
The box is unchecked in the Finder preferences.

I drag (or Command-Delete) an item to the trash and a window pops up saying, 'Are you sure you want to delete "x"? This item will be deleted immediately. You can't undo this action.

I've trawled the interweb but to no alas, and being a Mac user for over 10 years have never seen this before. Any help will be greatly appreciated!
 
That's the dialog you get when you trash a file residing on a network share. It's been this way since the very first Mac was networked with LocalTalk.
 
Also note that the Finder Preference deals with emptying the Trash and not moving a file to the Trash.
 
alimccarley said:
My Mac is Journaled HFS+ - is HFS+ the same as HFS?
Click to expand...

Yes, HFS+ is the upgraded version of HFS. The shift from HFS to HFS+ is analogous (and roughly contemporaneous) to Windows' move from FAT32 to NTFS, although HFS+ is closely related to HFS where FAT32 and NTFS are completely different filesystems. I just referred to it as the broad type HFS because the older version isn't around anymore and the + looked weird in the hyphenated term, but I guess that backfired.

alimccarley said:
If so, why is this still happening? This has only begun since I installed Snow Leopard.
Click to expand...

Oh, this is happening on your system (boot) partition?
 
BlueRevolution said:
That also applies non-HFS local drives/partitions.
Click to expand...

Not on my Mac. I just tried it on a FAT-format USB flash drive, and dragging a file to the Trash moves it to the Trash.

I also did 'ls -la' on the mounted volume, and it shows a ".Trashes" directory. An 'ls -laR' shows the trashed file, in an appropriately numbered sub-dir.


Getting back to the OP, maybe there's a permissions problem on the drive, and the Finder is unable to move the item to the appropriate Trash folder, so it offers the option of immediately deleting it. That's hypothetical: I don't know that Finder does this.

If the OP could copy and paste the following command in a Terminal window:
/sbin/mount
Click to expand...
Then copy and paste the output into a posting, it may provide some clues.
 
chown33 said:
Not on my Mac. I just tried it on a FAT-format USB flash drive, and dragging a file to the Trash moves it to the Trash.

I also did 'ls -la' on the mounted volume, and it shows a ".Trashes" directory. An 'ls -laR' shows the trashed file, in an appropriately numbered sub-dir.
Click to expand...

Hmm, maybe it's just NTFS and remote drives.

chown33 said:
Getting back to the OP, maybe there's a permissions problem on the drive, and the Finder is unable to move the item to the appropriate Trash folder, so it offers the option of immediately deleting it. That's hypothetical: I don't know that Finder does this.
Click to expand...

Good point. I didn't think that this was happening on the boot partition, but it sounds like that's the case. To the OP: have you tried repairing permissions? It could be that your computer doesn't have write permissions to the trash directories.
 
BlueRevolution said:
Hmm, maybe it's just NTFS and remote drives.
Click to expand...

If it were happening on NTFS, it implies Mac OS X can write to NTFS. I don't think it does that by default, and would require added software.

I don't think Repair Permissions will fix a mis-permissioned trash directory. Repair Permissions typically works by reading BOMs (Bill-Of-Material files) in the Receipts database and comparing to items on disk. I don't think a disk's .Trashes dir has a receipt. Still, I don't think it would hurt to run Repair Permissions, and I could be wrong about what it will repair.
 
chown33 said:
If it were happening on NTFS, it implies Mac OS X can write to NTFS. I don't think it does that by default, and would require added software.
Click to expand...

Yes, obviously with NTFS-3G.

chown33 said:
I don't think Repair Permissions will fix a mis-permissioned trash directory. Repair Permissions typically works by reading BOMs (Bill-Of-Material files) in the Receipts database and comparing to items on disk. I don't think a disk's .Trashes dir has a receipt. Still, I don't think it would hurt to run Repair Permissions, and I could be wrong about what it will repair.
Click to expand...

If not, it's easy enough to use chmod (and maybe chown 😉) to fix the trashes by hand.
 
I was getting the same error message. All the permissions were correct. I got rid of the problem by just quitting the Finder and restarting it.
 
the invisible .Trash folder has been deleted or has the wrong permissions. just relaunch Finder by option right clicking its Dock icon as said above ^
 
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