Mac – Force empty trash for Mac

file managementmac

Emptying trash on Mac is quite troublesome at times, because some files are locked.
Is there an easy way to force empty without going to the terminal typing the rm command?

Best Answer

As others have mentioned, you can hold down the option key (⌥) while choosing Empty Trash to ignore locked files. But if they're actually in use, you have a few options:

  • Figure out which applications are using the files with lsof and grep (e.g. lsof | grep in_use_filename), and quit those applications
  • Use the rm command to delete ~/.Trash/*
  • Choose "Secure Empty Trash…" from the Finder menu. If you have a lot of files, this will take a while, since it actually overwrites the contents before deleting... but if you don't, it's an easy way to ignore the purportedly in-use files and delete them anyway.

Secure Empty Trash

Related Question