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

findermacmacostrash

The Mac OS X 10.6 Trash shows an option "Put back" for files that were trashed after installing 10.6. However, it does not show where the file will be put back to.

So: using Finder, is there any way to tell where a trashed item came from?

(I know the original locations are stored in ~/.Trash/.DS_Store, so if I really need to know where a file came from, then I can figure it out using something like hexdump.)

Best Answer

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

Related: How do I check where the file in .Trash was removed from?

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