Moving items to trash brings up a warning prompt for immediate deletion

[Published Monday, June 9]

In some cases, when a user drags an item to the trash, instead of placing the item in the trash and displaying a full trash bin the computer will instead display a warning that the item will be deleted immediately. The user is presented with the option to continue or cancel the action.

This behavior is due to there not being an intact ".Trash" or ".Trashes" folder available for the system to store items that are placed in the trash. Normally this folder is hidden and located in the local user's home folder (or at the root of the drive for ".Trashes"). If the trash folder is corrupt or has permissions errors then the computer will not have a means of storing trashed files and only have the option of deleting them immediately.

NOTE: This behavior is normal for files being deleted from mounted network shares or other non-local resources.

Fixes

Manually delete the .Trash folder Upon deleting the .Trash folder located in your home directory, the system will make a new one that will have proper permissions and settings. To delete the folder open the terminal and run this command:

• rm -rf ~/.Trash

Manually delete the .Trashes folder If the problem still persists after the .Trash folder has been deleted, use the terminal to delete the .Trashes folder that's on the same drive that contains the file you are trying to delete.

• sudo rm -rf /Volumes/drive_name/.Trashes/`id-u`

(enter your password and press enter when prompted)

In the above command, replace "drive_name" with the name of the drive, if you have spaces then surround the drive name with quotes, or put a backslash before each space in the drive name, such as: My Hard Drive (which is the same as "My Hard Drive").

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