New twist on Trash problems

[MacKenzie999]

Hello everyone...

I know emptying the trash has been as issue for many since OSX began, and I have read as much as I can to try and solve this problem myself with no luck. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated, details are:

I was reinstalling Illustrator CS2 and trashed the old copy. What remains in my trash from this deletion is a folder called "Legal" and within this folder is a file called Tieng Viet.html. There is some non-English punctuation and it has a Safari icon. I can move these in and out of the trash with no problem.

I've tried emptying the trash, option-emptying the trash, using terminal to rm the file, and using the app Force Empty Trash (which I believe simply automates the terminal process), I've tried fixing permissions, all with no luck.

Get Info claims I can read & write. Details says it is owned by system, and is locked. I unlock it and try to change the owner to Mike (me) and I get the error message code 213.

Force Empty Trash generates this message:
rm: /Users/Mike/.Trash/Legal/Tieng Viet.html: No such file or directory
rm: /Users/Mike/.Trash/legal.localized: Directory not empty

I've also tried all of the above after rebooting, same results.

Any help is greatly appreciated, and be gentle, I'm a graphics guy not a tech of any kind. I basically only know enough to be dangerous.

Thanks in advance!
-Mike

PS: Non-Intel G5 Dual 2gHz, OSX.4.7

 

[tyr2]

You could try

"sudo rm -r /Users/Mike/.Trash/Legal"

From the command line which will recursivly delete anything in Legal (including the Legal directory itself). sudo makes it run as root so i'll bypass any permission problems you might have.

 

[MacKenzie999]

You could try

"sudo rm -r /Users/Mike/.Trash/Legal"

From the command line which will recursivly delete anything in Legal (including the Legal directory itself). sudo makes it run as root so i'll bypass any permission problems you might have.

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried this with the following response:
rm: /Users/Mike/.Trash/Legal: No such file or directory

I do not think I am hallucinating these files however.

 

[tyr2]

Strange. In the terminal copy the ouput of this command and paste back here, it'll help to see what's going on.

"find /Users/Mike/.Trash -ls"

(I assume this'll work ok, I'm not at my Mac at the moment, but it's fine on BSD & Linux)

 

[MacKenzie999]

Strange. In the terminal copy the ouput of this command and paste back here, it'll help to see what's going on.

"find /Users/Mike/.Trash -ls"

(I assume this'll work ok, I'm not at my Mac at the moment, but it's fine on BSD & Linux)

This is the result:
Last login: Fri Aug 25 12:36:42 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
Mikes-Computer:~ Mike$ find /Users/Mike/.Trash -ls
4614150 0 drwx------ 3 Mike Mike 102 Aug 25 12:36 /Users/Mike/.Trash
3996152 0 drwxrwxrwx 3 Mike admin 102 Aug 23 16:58 /Users/Mike/.Trash/Legal.localized
find: /Users/Mike/.Trash/Legal.localized/Ti?ng Viê?t.html: No such file or directory
Mikes-Computer:~ Mike$

Perhaps it's the (presumably) Asian punctuation that is the problem? The file name appears differently in Finder than it does in the Terminal response. Also, when I take the file out of the trash and try to highlight the filename to change or copy, it doesn't happen.

 

[tyr2]

Hmm yes, it seems to be the Asian characters that have caused the problem.

The rm command you tried earlier had the wrong directory, try this

"sudo rm -r /Users/Mike/.Trash/Legal.localized"

If you don't get any luck with that it might be worth running an fsck on the filesystem to ensure the directory structure is not corrupted:

Details on running FSCK are here:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/89736/

 

[jeremy.king]

Have you tried deleting EVERYTHING in the trash folder?

sudo rm -rf /Users/Mike/.Trash/*

Afterwards, make sure its empty with an

ls -la /Users/Mike/.Trash

 

[MacKenzie999]

Hmm yes, it seems to be the Asian characters that have caused the problem.

The rm command you tried earlier had the wrong directory, try this

"sudo rm -r /Users/Mike/.Trash/Legal.localized"

If you don't get any luck with that it might be worth running an fsck on the filesystem to ensure the directory structure is not corrupted:

Details on running FSCK are here:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/89736/

The directory change didn't solve it but running fsck did, after rebooting the trash ws emptyable, so thank you very much for all your advice.

One further question regarding fsck though: it seems to have run through the process a couple of times. I sat with it for maybe 20 minutes, then went away for another 15 or so. When I returned it didn't look like it was doing anything, although the entire time the fans were running like a jet engine. Anyway, the prompt was just a single block, no text, and after I typed in "reboot" the screen flashed some new text for a fraction of a second and rebooted. I noticed the word "killall" which makes me think it was still running fsck (I am not at all knowledgable about Unix but recognize some of it). Is there any danger in aborting fsck mid-process? My mac seems fine so far. Shoud I fsck again and allow it to run completely? If so, approx how long should that take? My hd is 160gb and getting full enough that I should be moving stuff off of it.

Thank you again for all your help!
-Mike

 

[tyr2]

The fans will run at full speed when you're in single user mode as the thermal monitoring is probably not running, it does this to be on the safe side, it's not an indication that your Mac is under partitulartly high load.

If you got back to a prompt where you could type 'reboot' then the fsck had completed. I can't remember ottomh what the single user prompt is but it's probably just '#' or '$'.

'killall' is normal, it just ensures that all processes are shutdown before it reboots.

Fsck varies as to how long it takes to run, it depends on things like how many files you have etc.. However 35 minutes seems on the very high side unless you've got a huge number of errors. If you didn't cancel it with ctrl+c (or similar) and just rebooted it with 'reboot' then it will be fine. If you cancelled it whilst it was running it's worth running it again and letting it complete in its own time.

Glad it got the problem fixed for you.

 

[Deadland]

same problem

4251636 0 drwx------ 6 chucknor chucknor 204 Apr 8 19:02 /Users/chucknorris/.Trash
4514955 16 -rw------- 1 chucknor chucknor 6148 Apr 8 19:02 /Users/chucknorris/.Trash/.DS_Store
446412 0 drwxrwxrwx 3 root admin 102 Apr 8 18:44 /Users/chucknorris/.Trash/Legal.doc
find: /Users/chucknorris/.Trash/Legal.doc/Tiếng Việt.html: No such file or directory
809716 0 dr-xr-xr-x 3 root admin 102 Apr 7 18:36 /Users/chucknorris/.Trash/Legal.localized
find: /Users/chucknorris/.Trash/Legal.localized/Tiếng Việt.html: No such file or directory
478384 0 drwxr-xr-x 3 root admin 102 Apr 7 18:11 /Users/chucknorris/.Trash/Legal.localized.doc
find: /Users/chucknorris/.Trash/Legal.localized.doc/Tiếng Việt.html: No such file or directory
chuck-norris-powerbook-g4-17:~ chucknorris$

any clue how to fix this?

 

[tvcommando]

Trash Tiếng Việt.html

Hi Folks! Professional help needed re: trashing the above. I read the '07 thread and have tried everything mentioned from the old stand by option key, to using the terminal, to fsck and then trash, and this little bugger (like a 'roach after a nuke) remains in my trash can. I think its starting to mock me!

I have a G5 dual 2Ghz PPC, Tiger 10.4.11 and little patience left...

The problem began when I tried to uninstall CS2 and said file remained in the trash.

HELP! Thanks in advance.

 

[tyr2]

Type these two commands in at the Terminal and report back with their output.

$ find ~/.Trash -ls
$ sudo find /.Trashes -ls

You'll need to put your password in when prompted.

 

[tvcommando]

Type these two commands in at the Terminal and report back with their output.

$ find ~/.Trash -ls
$ sudo find /.Trashes -ls

You'll need to put your password in when prompted.

Tyr2,
I'm not as up as I should be on Terminal...I pasted the above and got this:

Timothy-McCarty:~ timothymccarty$ $ find ~/.Trash -ls
-bash: $: command not found
Timothy-McCarty:~ timothymccarty$ $ sudo find /.Trashes -ls
-bash: $: command not found
Timothy-McCarty:~ timothymccarty$

what'd I do wrong?

update: so I tried again and then put my password in and then typed in the second line and got this.

379918 0 d-wx-wx-wt 2 root admin 68 Apr 3 2005 /.Trashes

 

[tyr2]

Tyr2,
I'm not as up as I should be on Terminal...I pasted the above and got this:

Timothy-McCarty:~ timothymccarty$ $ find ~/.Trash -ls
-bash: $: command not found
Timothy-McCarty:~ timothymccarty$ $ sudo find /.Trashes -ls
-bash: $: command not found
Timothy-McCarty:~ timothymccarty$

what'd I do wrong?

update: so I tried again and then put my password in and then typed in the second line and got this.

379918 0 d-wx-wx-wt 2 root admin 68 Apr 3 2005 /.Trashes

The '$' i was showing was just to indicate the prompt (i.e. the timothymccarty$) bit, you don't seen to type it. Just do 'find ~/.Trash -ls' and paste the output here.

 

[tvcommando]

i was showing was just to indicate the prompt (i.e. the timothymccarty$) bit, you don't seen to type it. Just do 'find ~/.Trash -ls' and paste the output here.

OK, Tyr2:
here's what I got:

Timothy-McCarty:~ timothymccarty$ find ~/.trash -ls
3227707 0 drwx------ 2 timothym timothym 68 Jul 5 23:20 /Users/timothymccarty/.trash
Timothy-McCarty:~ timothymccarty$