MacOS – Can’t delete .plist files from Trash

launchdmacosplisttrash

I have a program which, when deleting any app, also deletes the extra files and junk as well; including .plist files. Normally this works great though, this time around I've had a few files which won't allow me to empty the trash.

I get the following when I click on "Empty Trash":

The operation can’t be completed because the item
“com.justinmind.prototyperfree.plist” is in use.

The operation can’t be completed because the item
“com.marketcircle.Billings3.plist” is in use.

The operation can’t be completed because the item
“com.opendns.osx.DNSCrypt-Menubar.plist” is in use.

The operation can’t be completed because the item
“hewgill.com.Stack-Exchange-Notifier.plist” is in use.

I tried the following without success:

launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.justinmind.prototyperfree.plist and launchctl unload /Users/myname/.Trash/com.justinmind.prototyperfree.plist

Not sure how to stop these things so I can empty the trash. Any help would be appreciated, thanks!

OS X 10.9 (13A603)

Best Answer

When you have problems to empty the trash, rm -rf ~/.Trash/* in the terminal does the job for you.

Edit :

You have to keep in mind that there might be multiple .Trash directories.
For example on a USB stick or a external Drive, OSX will create another .Trash at the root of the drive. So you might need to use rm -rf /Volumes/DriveName/.Trash.*

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