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up vote 5 down vote favorite

I have a USB plugged in Mac. What I found was .Trashes was not emptied with the emptying trash (right click of the trash and run empty trash) for the USB drive.

What might be wrong? Is there any other way to empty trash the USB drive?

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3  
Interesting, emptying the trash always does so successfully for my USB drives. My only complaint about it is that often I'd like to only empty the trash on my USB drive and not have to do so for every drive on the system. – Matthew Frederick Jan 16 '11 at 0:34
2  
@Matthew try rm -R /Volumes/volumename/.Trashes/$UID – Gordon Davisson Jan 16 '11 at 2:55
@Gordon Perfect, thanks! Created a one-line Applescript to run the command and it's a couple of QuickSilver keystrokes any time. – Matthew Frederick Jan 16 '11 at 8:22

3 Answers

up vote 6 down vote accepted

It's possible that the files are in some other user's trash. The .Trashes folder at the top of each volume has subfolders for each different user, by user ID number (e.g. user #501's trash is in .Trashes/501). You can delete everyone's trash by deleting the entire .Trashes folder with sudo rm -R /Volumes/volumaname/.Trashes (warning: as with anything involving "rm -R", use this carefully; if you type it wrong, it could have ... unpleasant consequences).

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The "might be in someone else's Trash" is exactly the issue I was running into. This should be better advertised! – cdeszaq Nov 11 '12 at 16:28
up vote 1 down vote

Usual behavior:
When you delete something off a USB drive, it is moved to a .trashes folder on that volume. When plugged into your computer, deleted items will appear in your trash bin with everything else.
When you unplug it, items that you've deleted from that drive will no longer show up in your trash UNTIL you plug it in again. Then, you can empty the trash. It will really delete them from that drive.

If that isn't happening for you, here's my suggestion:
Select the drive in your Finder sidebar. Without selecting anything else, press cmd-i. Use the Sharing and Permissions section of that window to set Everyone to Read and Write.

Hope this helps.

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up vote 1 down vote

I don't know wether it's the best answer, but at least it's working answer.

Open the command line, go to the USB volume (/Volumes/USB for my case), and /bin/rm -rf ./Trashes/* works fine with me.

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