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Trash Icon Show Full but Contains Nothing

M

mastershakess

macrumors 6502
Original poster
May 14, 2008
498
3
Bel Air, MD
Hello,

I have had this proble for awhile and I can not figure it out.

The Trash Icon does not change when the trash icon is full or empty, appears to be full at all times even after a secure trash empty. Open up trash and there are no files inside and the file count is zero but the icon on dock remains the full icon.

Any ideas?

Thank you.
 
Hmm. Maybe open terminal and try the following commands:

cd .Trash
ls -la

If you see any files other than the . and .. directories, kill them all with

rm -rf *

(Do the above command only when you are in the .Trash directory - it's a delete everything from here and subs command.)

Maybe try repairing permissions.
 
ScoobyMcDoo said:
Hmm. Maybe open terminal and try the following commands:

cd .Trash
ls -la

If you see any files other than the . and .. directories, kill them all with

rm -rf *

(Do the above command only when you are in the .Trash directory - it's a delete everything from here and subs command.)

Maybe try repairing permissions.
Click to expand...


I will have to try that

Consultant said:
Haven't seen that for years.

Repair permissions should solve it.
Click to expand...


Didn't not fix problem :( Already tried.
 
i'm having the same problem. trash shows as being full but contains nothing. i've tried repairing disk permission with the disk utility, i've tried that empty trash command in the terminal, and i've tried trashing some duplicated files, all with no success =(
 
There might be some hidden files in there.

If you dont mind reinstalling the OS (if you can backup your data) then try that.
 
Come to think of it, instead of reinstalling your whole OS you could:

1) Check if there is any updates available
2) Do that rm Terminal command, it worked for me with a similar Trash problem
3) Just leave it, its just a icon on your Dock, not really a problem
 
yeah, reinstalling im sure would work, but if thats my only option i guess i'll just leave it. its just more aggravating then anything else :(
 
Vikz said:
restart the dock

maybe that will help you
Click to expand...

I assume he has already rebooted his Mac, that is the first thing to try whenever almost anything goes wrong (the good ol' turn it off and on again trick! :D) but if not then do so, if it dosent work after the reboot then restarting the Dock wont do much at all.
 
This happened to me a few months ago. I tried everything but couldn't figure out what was causing the issue...when it came down to it, a file kept appearing in my trash that looked something like this " <<<<O>>>>" with a few more weird glyphs.

It turns out this file was associated with my winXP bootcamp partition somehow. I booted into WinXP did a disk repair and I was then able to empty my trash.

Good Luck!
Eric
 
i have restarted the dock, the computer and the finder, but i did not think to check my WinXP boot partition. thanks for the idea, i'll let you know how it goes :)
 
low and behold Windows was in fact the problem!! lol i should have known!

thanks emt8q5, that did the trick! :D

so just in an case anyone else runs into this, here is exactly what i did.

i booted into WinXP and right clicked on the C: drive and went down to "properties". then i clicked on the tools tab. under the "Error-checking" option i hit the "Check Now..." button. then in the new window that pops up i hit the "Automatically fix file system errors" check box, and then clicked the start button. it said i would have to restart for the check to take place so i restarted and booted into Windows again.

after that it started the check right before going to the Windows loading screen, and there was some message about a bad file in the trash which it fixed

i hope this will help someone else from going through all the aggravation i went through :)
 
Tried CMD+Option+Shift+Delete?

Any attached hard drives (other than your Macintosh HD)?
 
mastershakess said:
Didn't not fix problem :( Already tried.
Click to expand...

Big surprise there. Repairing permissions is completely unrelated to most problems; I really don't understand why people keep insisting on repairing permissions. At most it might return a particular file to back under your ownership or root's ownership if you manually changed it or if it was modified after installation by something else.
 
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It Worked!!!!!!!!!!!

Thanks freeboot & emt8q5......... Just registered to this forum.... You guys are great.... It figures I have been a mac user since emac. I should have known better than to let Bill Gates eat off of my APPLE tree...
 
I finally was able to empty my trash after trying everything listed above.

Here's all of the things that didn't work (for me), and the odd thing that I did that did work:

I kept getting the error message: The item ".Trash" is in use right now and cannot be opened.
I was about to lose my mind.

  • I have a program called "Smart Trash"...nope.
  • I tried "Super Empty Trash"...nope.
  • I ran some terminal commands followed by a Repair Disk Permissions...nope.
  • Option-Empty...nope.
  • I booted VMWare Fusion / XP, and did a CHKDSK...nope.
  • I tried creating an empty folder and dragging the files (17 of them) into the empty folder, then deleting the empty folder, but my computer wouldn't let me pull the files out of the trash and move them to the new folder.
  • I put the files into A Better Finder Rename and tried to rename them...nope.

Then, I did something that you'd never think would solve the problem, but for some reason it did.

I opened up the trash, did a Cmd-A to select all, then a Cmd-I to find out how (collectively) big all of these files were and when my Mac tried to access the files to see their size, they disappeared.
I have no idea why that was the thing that worked, but my Trash is empty and the paper in my trash icon is gone.

Just thought I'd share this because I know there are others out there that have tried everything as well. I'm not promising this will work for you, but what have you got to lose, right?

J.
 
In case anyone else comes looking, here's another solution: Unmount any external media such as hard drives and flash drives. In my case, unmounting an SD card corrected the icon. Mounting the same card did NOT bring back the incorrect Trash icon state.
 
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dysamoria said:
In case anyone else comes looking, here's another solution: Unmount any external media such as hard drives and flash drives. In my case, unmounting an SD card corrected the icon. Mounting the same card did NOT bring back the incorrect Trash icon state.
Click to expand...
Thank you! This worked for me. I unmounted an external drive and my trash can went back to showing itself as empty, which was correct.
 
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