Emtpy Trash HELP!

C

corimay

PeanutButter
I moved MS Office 10.1.2 to my trash and tried to empty the trash. My computer froze, so I had to unplug the power to shut it off. I rebooted and every time I touched the trash, my computer would completely freeze.

So I tried going into Terminal to remove the trash contents
cd ~/.Trash
rm -r *

....then it asked if I wanted to remove the items ... I typed "yes" ... but my trash didn't empty.

I've never used Terminal until today, so i'm not sure what I'm doing wrong.

Can someone please help!? I was thinking about reformatting my computer, but I just got it a few days ago! Hopefully its just the Trash that's freezing my computer ....

thanks.
 
Try a slight variation

Type 'sudo -rf ' (include the last space) and drag the offending item in the trash onto the terminal window.

Hit enter and enter your password.
 
Actually, your trash did empty with the initial command. The reason you thought it didn't work is because the Trash icon wasn't updated. (You can test this for yourself. Make sure your trash is empty. Then drag a file to it for removal. Then execute your first two commands in the Terminal. Then open your trash. It will be empty, but the icon won't be updated to reflect what you did in the Terminal.)

The first set of commands worked, the second set of commands didn't actually do anything because the trash was already empty. Rebooting made it look like it worked because the Dock & Finder relaunched at your next reboot and realized that ~/.Trash was empty, so the icon reflected that.

To avoid this cosmetic glitch, you can go to Finder>Empty Trash or else execute this command in the Terminal:
osascript -l AppleScript -e 'tell Application "Finder" to empty'
 
I have seen that too. Sorry I didn't understand the problem.

Keep the commands I gave you because there are times when there are files the trash will refuse to delete (permissions, locked, etc).
 
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