Best way to force empty trash?

[Brian@Denver]

Force Empty the Trash

I tried everything everyone suggested and nothing worked. I had backed up files to my hard drive, and when trying to empty them in the trash (from a previous system back up) it wouldn't delete them because my mac thought they were system files or files in use.

I came up with a pretty cool solution, as it was the file name/type that was causing the issues... I simply changed the name of the files manually and gave them all the ".doc" extension and then used the following commands from the terminal, and "voila" it worked!

TERMINAL COMMANDS (once stubborn file names have been changed):
sudo rm -rf ~/.Trash
[ENTER PASSWORD]
sudo rm -rf /Volumes/*/.Trashes

Worked great for me... Let me know if you have the same (great) results....

I have a ton of files stuck in my trash bin, and I can't get it to empty. Several files are from a bunch of old backups that I no longer needed.

I tried an app called Tra****!, but it's not working for me.

Are there better suggestions out there to get this emptied.

I am running OSX 10.6.8

Thanks
Mark

 

[pigoo3]

I tried everything everyone suggested and nothing worked.

What OS version are you running? The original poster of this thread was running OS 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard). In case it was missed...this is almost a 4.5 year old thread. Depending what OS version you are running...suggestions in this thread may not apply.

- Nick

 

[KevinJS]

I was fooling around with Automator a while back, and eventually managed to do what I wanted, which was to add named subfolders to a folder. In the meantime, I ended up with a series of empty folders in the trash, nested I don't know how deep. I was unable to empty the trash, presumably because the file path was too long. Changing the name of the parent folder cleared whatever was causing the problem and I was able to empty the trash.