Macos – Mac Trash won’t empty, and rm ~/.Trash/* does nothing

macostrash

The Trash icon on my Dock shows the Trash containing files. I tried right-clicking and Empty Trash, but it still shows files there.

When I open the Trash folder in Finder, I can see several files still there.

I tried manually emptying the Trash with rm ~/.Trash/*, but that doesn't work. In fact, ls ~/.Trash/ shows the folder being empty!

I tried Force Quitting Finder, but that didn't help either.

I'm sure rebooting would fix the problem, but I'd prefer a solution that didn't require rebooting.

Specs:

  • Mac OS X 10.8.2 Mountain Lion
  • MacBook Pro mid-2009

Best Answer

Rebooting doesn't help. I used Disk Utility.app to try to repair the USB drive. It turns out the file system is corrupted; only backing up my files, reformatting, and restoring my files fixes the .Trashes folder on the drive.

The Seagate also forcibly disconnects when the cable is jiggled; Hardware issues likely caused the file system corruption in the first place.

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