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Undeletable ghost item in trash

B

BileGhost

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 29, 2008
80
0
I have a ghost item in my trash. Its undeletable, I cant touch it, drag it out of the trash, or find out anything about it except that it is an alias, its size is 0 and its name is some combination of characters I've never seen before.
When I try to drag it out of the trash, it disappears, but it appears again some time later. Anyone had this happen before? Any ideas on how to fix it?

Thanks.

Edit: Anyone googling this, I eject (unmount) my windows drive, and the file disappears... Problem kinda solved.
 
I've got the same thing. File names are weird characters with a date of Dec 31, 1903, zero kb in size, kind alias.
Have yet to figure out how to get rid of them.
 
If you can drag them to the desktop, then go

sudo rm /Users/Yourname/Desktop/thefile.extention

in the Terminal. If that doesn't work then try rm -f instead.

Be very careful with that command.
 
By using a disk utility.

If it is FAT formatted just open up the Disk Utility in your Utilities folder (in the Applications folder).

Select the partition then hit the repair button.
 
I can't delete it from the terminal, as I don't know the name of it(If I try to copy it, the file disappears, to reappear moments later).

I can't drag it to the desktop, as soon as I touch it, it disappears.

Repairing the windows partition didnt help.

Neither did secure empty trash.

Any other ideas?
 
dl.php


Here you go. You don't have to worry about it disappearing, its always there when I look for it. When I touch it it dissappears, but its back again within seconds.
 
tuffluffjimmy said:
have you tried booting from your Leopard disk and using disk utility to repair your OSX disk?
Click to expand...

Nope. I'm not at home atm so dont have my disk here, but I will try it later if you think it will help. Looks like its the last option...
 
No idea my friend and it appears none of us know either; try an Archive and Install. If that doesn't work take it in.
 
I dont really want to go to those extremes. I will be taking it to a store to have a warantable repair done, so I will ask about it then.
Thanks everyone for your help,

BileGhost
 
Just boot into Safe Mode (hold down shift at start up) and then empty the trash and restart.
 
I had almost this exact same problem on a micro SD card just yesterday. I verified using disk utility, it told me there was a problem, I repaired the disk and disk utility renamed the file which I then deleted.

When you're in terminal, in your .Trash folder, and you type "ls -la" then press tab, what does it give you? I guess you could rm -rf .Trash/ then recreate it with the right permissions, but I won't suggest that till someone confirms it won't screw things up on your system.
 
If I type ls -la, I get this:

Dave:.trash Dave$ ls -la
total 0
drwx------ 2 Dave staff 68 31 Jul 14:32 .
drwxr-xr-x@ 42 Dave staff 1428 31 Jul 14:32 ..

Then if I hit tab it says:

Display all 1431 possibilities? (y or n)

And if I type y, it lists a hell of a lot of stuff...

Edit: Oh yeah, when I hold shift on startup, it just loads and loads and loads for about 10 or 15 minutes, then I get bored and reset it.
 
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