Mac OS X Hacks

Stubborn Trash, Stuck Images, and Jammed CDs

Every so often it takes a little know-how to empty the Trash or eject a CD; learn when and how.

There are times, rare as they may be, when OS X goes a little haywire and simply won’t spit out a CD or DVD, unmount a disk image, or empty the Trash. Often things have a way of sorting themselves with a little patience, with a Finder restart, by logging out and back in, or (heaven forbid) by rebooting your Mac. Sometimes, however, that stuck CD/DVD or image doesn’t budge or the Trash simply refuses to empty.

Stubborn Trash

It does the heart good to do some occasional housekeeping. One such activity is emptying the Trash folder to free up more disk space for your Mac. This is usually as simple as Finder → Empty Trash . . . or

-Shift-Delete. Every so often, though, a file or folder refuses to leave.

First a little background on the mystical Trash can. Every file you delete is moved into a folder called .Trash in your home directory:

% ls -al
total 48
drwxr-xr-x 20 weimengl staff 680 Dec 14 12:35 .
drwxrwxr-t 8 root wheel 272 Dec 10 09:30 ..
drwx------ 6 weimengl staff 204 Dec 14 12:55 .Trash
...

To dip into the Trash, simply open a Terminal [Hack #48] window, navigate to the .Trash directory, and list files:

% cd .Trash
% ls -al

Emptying the Trash is nothing more than deleting all the contents of your .Trash folder.

In use

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