Mac always warns “You can’t undo this action” and skips the Trash when deleting a file

macosx-snow-leopardpermissionstrash

I repaired the permissions on my iMac and am now getting this dialog box whenever I delete something. I checked Finder > Preferences and "Empty Trash Securely" and "Show Warning" are both unchecked. When I delete a file I get a confirmation box and once I confirm, the file is deleted completely, skipping the Trash:

Are you sure you want to delete "filename"?
This item will be deleted immediately. You can't undo this action.

Any way to have it move items to the Trash, the default way?

EDIT: Here's the screenshot of the dialog.
Dialog: Are you sure you want to delete "..."? This item will be deleted immediately. You can't undo this action.

This came up when I created an empty folder on my Desktop and chose "Move to Trash".

Best Answer

It is what will always happen on any drive that the Finder cannot create a .trash folder. This is the same with written CDs, read-only USBs, most network shares (if you write to the root folder, it'll make a trash folder).

As it is happening on your own hard drive, it may be that you no longer own the Trash folder. This command will make your user account take ownership of it.

'sudo chown youruser ~/.Trash'

Using `lsof` to find what's keeping the file open

Open up Terminal.app and use the following command to get to your Trash:

cd ~/.Trash

Now, enter the following command:

lsof name-of-file

For example, in the above screenshot, it would be: lsof pdf\ 08-53-59.pdf (important to escape spaces here). You can also just enter lsof with a space afterwards, and then drag the file from Finder's Trash into the Terminal window.

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The command will output something like the following:

charon:.Trash werner$ lsof pdf\ 08-53-39.pdf 
COMMAND  PID   USER   FD   TYPE DEVICE  SIZE/OFF     NODE NAME
Finder  5022 werner  txt    REG   14,2 636141715 32494023 pdf 08-53-39.pdf

In that case, we know that Finder is keeping the file open. For any other application, it would be easy to just activate and quit it. In case of the Finder, there's no obvious "quit" button.

To kill the Finder and release the document, just enter the following in the Terminal:

killall Finder

You should now be able to empty your Trash.

Other tricks

If the above does not succeed, here are some very basic tricks you can try to empty your trash:

Log out from your user, and log in again
Reboot the Mac, log in again

Best Answer

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Using lsof to find what's keeping the file open

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Using `lsof` to find what's keeping the file open