May 3, 2024

How to Force Empty Your Mac Trash Bin

Posted August 27, 2010 at 6:00pm by iClarified · 314266 views
These are instructions on how to force empty your Mac OS X Trash Bin if some items won't delete.

You may run into instances when an item in your Trash Bin prevents it from being emptied. For example, you might see a message like, The operation can't be completed because the item "" is in use.

In this situation first make sure that any application that could be using the item is closed and if possible restart the computer. If the Trash Bin still won't empty then continue follow thing these instructions.






Step One
Launch Terminal from your Applications:Utilities folder


Step Two
Type rm -rf ~/.Trash/* then press enter.


Step Three
Now reopen your Trash Bin and you will see that all files have been removed successfully