Huntsville Macintosh Users Group
Empty Trash from Terminal Empty Trash from Terminal
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by Marius Schamschula

There are some situations where a file or folder refueses to be deleted by selecting " Empty Trash...". What to do? Since Mac OS X is based on BSD UNIX, we can use the command line to do the "dirty" work.

Open the Terminal

Start by double clicking /Applications/Utilities/Terminal. You are now faced with the UNIX command line.

Empty the Trash

We now need to issue a command to empty the trash. Note: Be very careful to type this exactly, better yet copy and paste it (The $ is the prompt, don't type/copy this). Why you ask? There is a potential to erase large parts of your hard drive. Enough said.

$sudo rm -Rf ~/.Trash/*
Version 1.0.0 - 20041114
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