Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

saxman · Apr 15, 2004, 07:12 PM

Hi all

Just a small thing but it's driving me nuts.

I have a 0K file in the trash which I cant delete. When I "empty trash" it says it can't complete the operation because file "???HFS+ is locked". When I "force empty trash" it says I "don't have suficient permission" to delete the file.

This is from my firewire HD - remove the drive and the trash is empty.

I have full access permission on this entire drive.

Tell me what I've missed!

Cheers

saxman · Apr 15, 2004, 08:28 PM

further info:

I am running panther 10.3.3

I did a search on this and I have tried all the suggestions in previous posts. None of these suggestions appear to relate to an external FW drive, only the system disk.

cheers

tooki · Apr 15, 2004, 11:21 PM

Have you tried checking "Ignore Permissions on this volume" in Get Info for the FireWire drive?

tooki

redJag · Apr 16, 2004, 11:19 AM

sounds like you mounted that drive in OS 9? Well the solution I found is logging in as root and deleting it manually with the rm command from the terminal. It's been awhile since I did it so it may not work anymore.. just a suggestion.

homgran · Apr 17, 2004, 10:11 AM

I've had exactly the same problem with my FireWire drive. I believe the problem stems from my undeletable file containing foreign (in my case Scandinavian) characters. I, too, have tried all of the archived posts from the MacNN boards but to no avail. Here is a .pdf file containing everything I have tried so far:

http://www.gneilson.plus.com/rm_rf_fails.pdf

I strongly suggest you have a look at it, since it details a large number of different attempts to delete my problem file. Hopefully one of them will help the original poster. It'd also be nice if someone could give me a couple of other options for deleting the file (short of re-formatting the disk!).

I have been told that the fsck command could do the trick, but if it comes across a bad sector I will probably lose all of my data - so I'm leaving that as a last resort, and I'll only consider it once I've backed everything up (sheesh, a back-up of old back-ups!).

Cheers,

-Matt

vcutag · Apr 17, 2004, 11:11 AM

Originally posted by saxman:
further info:

I am running panther 10.3.3

I did a search on this and I have tried all the suggestions in previous posts. None of these suggestions appear to relate to an external FW drive, only the system disk.

cheers

I just had this problem myself. Do a search by selection on the files in your Trash folder, get it so that all of the locked files are in the Finder window at one time (mine were 4 separate folders.) Get Info on the offending files, and then under "General" make sure the "Locked" check box is not checked.

It sounds really simple, I felt like an idiot for not thinking of that sooner.

homgran · Apr 17, 2004, 11:25 AM

Originally posted by vcutag:
Get Info on the offending files, and then under "General" make sure the "Locked" check box is not checked.

Thanks for the reply - unfortunately, the file I've been trying to delete is already unlocked.

I'm glad a topic like this has come up again - hopefully this time we'll uncover a method of deleting those annoying files once and for all!

-Matt

vcutag · Apr 17, 2004, 11:33 AM

Originally posted by homgran:
Thanks for the reply - unfortunately, the file I've been trying to delete is already unlocked.

I'm glad a topic like this has come up again - hopefully this time we'll uncover a method of deleting those annoying files once and for all!

-Matt

d'oh! Oh well. Good luck with it, though.

SSharon · Apr 17, 2004, 09:40 PM

I've never tried it but its worth a shot. empty

wadesworld · Apr 17, 2004, 10:47 PM

Originally posted by tooki:
Have you tried checking "Ignore Permissions on this volume" in Get Info for the FireWire drive?

tooki

He absolutely should NOT do this.

The best way to get rid of it is through the terminal. "sudo rm filename" should get rid of it.

Wade

homgran · Apr 18, 2004, 05:24 AM

Originally posted by SSharon:
I've never tried it but its worth a shot. empty

Ooohhh! I really thought that was going to work, but unfortunately it didn't. iEmpty either claims to have emptied the trash (which it can't do), unexpectedly quits or returns an AppleScript Error of type 1. I'm convinced that the "file" is no more than a corrupt header which points to free drive space (as rustle explained in that .pdf file, above).

Originally posted by wadesworld:
The best way to get rid of it is through the terminal. "sudo rm filename" should get rid of it.

This is what I would normally do, but filename contains, in my case, non-standard characters which cannot be displayed in either the Finder or the Terminal - so there's no way of specifying which file I want to remove. Furthermore, the file appears to have no inode number ("ls -i" returns nothing), so I can't remove it that way either.

But thanks to everyone for the suggestions - keep 'em coming!

-Matt

orry_main · Apr 18, 2004, 02:24 PM

Originally posted by homgran:
This is what I would normally do, but filename contains, in my case, non-standard characters which cannot be displayed in either the Finder or the Terminal - so there's no way of specifying which file I want to remove. Furthermore, the file appears to have no inode number ("ls -i" returns nothing), so I can't remove it that way either.

Have you tried just dragging the file onto the terminal window? This will automatically copy the path into the terminal, so that you don't have to type it out.

homgran · Apr 18, 2004, 04:47 PM

Originally posted by orry_main:
Have you tried just dragging the file onto the terminal window? This will automatically copy the path into the terminal, so that you don't have to type it out.

Yep, I just tried that, and for some reason the Terminal rejects the file-icon (similar to when, for example, you try and drag a .pdf over the QuickTime icon - upon releasing the mouse-button the icon ghosts back to its position in the Finder).

I have, however, found a way of representing the file [in octal] in the Terminal: since I can see that the first character is a "B", I type "rm B[press tab]" and the terminal automatically completes the filename (replacing each unrecognisable character with its octal equivalent). Unfortunately, pressing [Return] gives the message

Code:
rm: : No such file or directory

Even more confusing: typing "ls -B" displays no results (when "man ls" states that the "-B" argument will force the terminal to display non-printable characters as \xxx where xxx is the numeric value of the character in octal). Something's definitely wrong here, and I'm thinking that I may have to fsck my FireWire drive.

-Matt

saxman · Apr 19, 2004, 05:10 PM

Hi again

Wow, I didn't think that this discussion would get so big!

I'm glad I'm not the only one with this problem.

I have tried all the suggestions in this post, none seem to do the trick.

iEmpty says the trash is empty when it isn't.

Thanks for all the good ideas and comments tho.

Keep 'em comin'

Cheers

El Mariachi · May 6, 2004, 04:53 AM

I also had truble with some files that containing foreign characters...

All the files I wanted to delete was in the trash all the time, but never got deleted...

I tried everything but they wouldn't go away...

Then I used DiskWarrior 3.02. I started up from the CD, Repaired all the partions.

In the report there was something about files with bad file name...

When I starded up again I could empty the trash, and all the files were gone.