Macos – How to restore all the files from trash in Mac OS X

macosrestoretrash

I can put back the items one by one, but there are too many files, how could I restore all the files in the trash?

Best Answer

MacOS keeps file meta information about deleted files in ~/.Trash/.DS_Store, which also contains records of the original locations. I've written a perl script that scans ~/.Trash/.DS_Store file and prints commands to move all files back to their original location. The output can be fed directly to shell.

Perl script: https://gist.github.com/cpq/3d58e144a3fc2e47c54a

To run, download script, start terminal and type perl restore_mac_trash.pl

Related Solutions

Macos – how to delete a single item from trash forever in mac os x

Open a terminal window and type in "rm " (without the quotes, but with a space at the end).

Open the trash and drag the file you want to delete onto the terminal window. The file path will appear.

Press return in the terminal window to delete the file.

You can remove multiple items by highlighting the trash item and scroll down as many items as you want removed, hold shift key and highlight last item and all items in between will be highlighted. Drag over to terminal, as above, and all will be deleted.

works for me on 10.6.8

Macos – How to tell where an item in the Trash came from

You can use dsstore_dump.pl tool which can read a store file's records in human-readable format.

It's part of the Mac-Finder-DSStore project written in perl by Wim L which provides routines for reading and writing the .DS_Store files generated by the OS X. See also: dsstore_dump.pl at GitHub and at my fork.

Sample usage:

$ perl dsstore_dump.pl ~/.Trash/.DS_Store

    &makeEntries("foo.png",
        ptbL => "Users/username/Desktop/",
        ptbN => "foo.png"
    ),

Installation of this tool is covered in README file.

You can also run above script using the following one-liner in your Terminal:

perl <(curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kenorb/binfiles/master/dsstore_dump.pl) ~/.Trash/.DS_Store

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Macos – how to delete a single item from trash forever in mac os x

Macos – How to tell where an item in the Trash came from

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