Mac Os X Empty Trash On External Drive Terminal

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Jul 14, 2017 The operating system presents all these as one Trash folder on your dock, but the files themselves can be found in a hidden folder in the root directory of every drive called.Trashes. You can’t see this folder unless set your Mac to view hidden folders, or plug your external drive into a Windows machine. Before using the terminal, you can use force empty Mac Trash bin with shortcuts. Go to Trash and select the item that you want to delete by Control-click and select Delete. You can hold down the Option key while you try emptying Trash. If none of the above methods works, we can always use Terminal to force the trash to empty on Mac. Aug 28, 2013  How to empty trash on mac using terminal - Duration. How to Copy iPhoto Photos to External Hard Drive - Duration. How to set Secure Empty Trash in Mac® OS X™ - Duration. Jun 10, 2020 The evolution of Mac Trash Bin The difference between Empty Trash and Secure Empty Trash. When you empty trash in macOS, the files inside aren’t actually erased. The space they occupied is marked by the system as available for overwriting, but the files themselves remain on your drive until they’re overwritten by something else. It used to be that you could force the trash to empty on your Mac using sudo rm -rf /.Trash/., but it doesn’t work in El Capitan or Sierra. If you are running OS X 10.10 or higher, follow these steps instead. Note: There are keyboard shortcuts you can use force your Mac to empty the trash.

Sometimes you want to delete data permanently from your Mac, but the data seems too important for Mac that it doesn’t delete it permanently. There can be many reasons for the same, the item deleted could still be in use or locked or maybe the item has a special character. However, if you still want the item to be removed permanently, it can be done!

You can force empty trash on Mac for good with the help of Terminal.

Empty trash mac

Note: For older versions, you can force the items in the trash bin to delete permanently by using sudo Ek-rf ~/.Trash/*.

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If you are using a higher version such as El Capitan or Sierra, follow through:

Keyboard Shortcuts:

Before using the terminal, you can use force empty Mac Trash bin with shortcuts. Go to Trash and select the item that you want to delete by Control-click and select Delete. You can hold down the Option key while you try emptying Trash.

If none of the above methods works, we can always use Terminal to force the trash to empty on Mac.

How to Force Empty Trash Bin on a Mac Using Terminal?

On your desktop, look for a magnifying glass at the top right-hand side corner to bring up Spotlight.

  • Type Terminal to launch Terminal on your Mac.
  • Enter the below-mentioned command on Terminal without pressing Enter afterward
  • Sudo rm -R
  • While typing the command, make sure there should be space after R to make the command work.
  • Now Control-click on Trash icon to launch it.
  • Select all the files present in the Trash bin folder.
  • Drag and drop the files into Terminal Window.
  • Hit Enter.
  • To execute the command, enter your admin password. Hit enter again.

Note: when you will enter the password into Terminal, you will not see the password being typed.

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Thus, you can force empty into the trash bin. The process might take a little bit more time if there are large files in Trash.

Try it and let us know whether it worked for you or not, if the process is not executed like it is supposed to be, you might have forgotten to add space after R. Repeat the process by adding space after R. In this way you can force empty trash on Mac with ease.

Mac Os X Empty Trash On External Drive Terminal 1

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For some reason, emptying the trash in OS X has always been a slow process, especially if you have a lot of files there. I tanked a huge folder that had over 10,000 items in it and it took a whopping 30 minutes to trash it!

There isn’t too much you can do about this since it’s the way the operating system works, but if you know how to use Terminal and aren’t afraid of it, then you can speed up the process.

The first thing you can do is to make sure you are not securely deleting your trash. This is an option in OS X that will completely overwrite the data that was stored where those deleted files were.

Basically, it makes sure that no data can be recovered once it has been deleted. Most people would not want this unless they are storing super sensitive information that they would not want anyone to be able to see even after the data has been deleted.

Go to Finder, then click on Preferences and then click on Advanced.

Make sure Empty Trash Securely is not checked. If you had that checked for any reason, it would take a lot longer to empty the trash. If this option wasn’t checked and emptying the trash is still slow, you can empty the trash using Terminal.

Note: The Empty Trash Securely option has been removed from OS X El Capitan and probably all future versions of OS X.

Mac

Empty Trash using Terminal

Open Terminal by going to Applications, Utilities and Terminal and type in the following command:

Make sure you type it exactly as it appears above with no extra spaces or anything else. Using this command incorrectly can lead to deletion of files and folders you did not intend to delete.

Emptying the trash using the Terminal is significantly faster than the traditional method of using the GUI. Most of the time it’s probably not worth going into the Terminal, but if you have a huge amount of data that you just deleted, it might be worth the extra effort to save some time.

Note that using this command in the terminal does not delete the trash that is from external hard drives or other partitions, just the local files on your Mac.

Empty Trash Vista

If this command is not working for you and the trash is not being emptied, you might have to run the command as sudo. To do that, just add sudo to the front:

Os X Empty Trash On External Drive

When you use the sudo command, you’ll need to enter the password for the account in order for the task to complete. So if the trash won’t delete or you get an error message when trying to empty the trash, you can try this method to fix the issue.

Mac Delete Trash On External Drive

That’s it! If you are having issues/problems with emptying the trash in OS X Lion or other thoughts, please post a comment here and let us know! Enjoy!