My Trash Won’t Empty!

My Mac has been having issues lately. It can’t empty the trash!

I put stuff in there, I hit “Empty” and it says it does, but the Trash icon still says there’s something in there. I look, and it’s not showing me any errors.

I’ve let it go for a while because I couldn’t find anything. I went to ~/.Trashes and /.Trashes and everything was empty there. This past weekend I got out my install disk and booted off it, did a full disk and permissions repair and it said that everything was all right.

Well this morning, I got the bright idea to check the bootcamp partition. Sure enough, there’s a .Trashes on that partition, with a folder called “502” in it. I went ahead and tried to just remove it…

Wako-Bytes:BOOTCAMP chris$ rm -rf .Trashes/

To which my computer told me:
rm: .Trashes//502/\004␀␀␀ö\001␀␀.\024␀␀: File name too long
rm: .Trashes//502: Directory not empty
rm: .Trashes/: Directory not empty

Doing an ‘ls’ shows me this:
Wako-Bytes:502 chris$ ls
??????????o?????????.???????

I couldn’t move the folder, I couldn’t remove it, I couldn’t do anything.

So to fix this problem, I had to boot into Windows and run a full disk check there. During that check, it converts that whole folder into a file, which you can then REMOVE! 🙂

Problem solved.

I’m very excited to go home now and see if that fixed all my time machine issues as well!

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