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I was cleaning up my Mac (on El Capitan 10.11.2), and I tried to delete some obscure old Word file. When I clicked on "empty trash", it gave me the message that the file was being used. I didn't know what was using it, and didn't want to cause problems, so I used lsof | grep /Users/myusername/.Trash and found that the QuickLook process had it open 12 times! Should I delete the file? Why on earth does Quick Look have it open at all?

PS: I quick-looked the file again and ran lsof | grep -c /Users/myusername/.Trash, which told me that it was then open 18 times, in case that helps.

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Try running qlmanage -r. This should reload QuickLook and make it so it's no longer focused on those files. You can also try using something like Trash It! if after restarting and relaunching/killing Finder and QuickLook does nothing.

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  • Yeah, I'll just use rm eventually. I'm kind of just curious as to why this might happen.
    – Morgan H
    Commented Feb 1, 2016 at 21:40

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