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Like the title says -- I can't empty the trash on my OSX (10.6.4). I get "The operation can't be completed because an unexpected error occurred (error code -8003)" alert with stop & continue buttons, but continue seems to also stop.

I've rebooted.

I've run Disk first aid.

Any hints?

Thanks!

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my hint: superuser.com – ikinci viking Nov 13 '10 at 15:47

migrated from stackoverflow.com Nov 14 '10 at 3:12

2 Answers

up vote 2 down vote

You could try opening the OSX terminal and using sudo rm -ri ~/.Trash/* this will prompt you to delete each file individually. It will also prompt you for your login password.

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Any reason to use the -i? Why not rm -rf? Just askin'... – Olie Nov 13 '10 at 15:53
Oh just to be safe in case there's something there you want to keep. I like to be careful with sudo and rm -rf. I know people who have accidently typed sudo -rm -rf / and bad things happened. – GWW Nov 13 '10 at 15:54
@Olie: SAFETY FIRST! The -i will prompt you to to confirm every deletion. This is just a darn good habit to get into. – Cody Gray Nov 13 '10 at 15:55
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Oh, I'm with you guys on safety -- but I was about to empty-trash-all from the GUI without looking at what was in there, so it's not MUCH different. Yeah, GWW's typo would be Very Bad, but I don't think "in case you want to keep" is a real concern. There were 1000s of files, so I compromised and did yes | rm -ri... so I could at least see the filename list. Thanks! – Olie Nov 13 '10 at 15:58
Also, while this worked, I'd be interested if anyone can relate what "error code -8003" was trying to communicate. – Olie Nov 13 '10 at 16:02
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up vote 1 down vote

Slowly emptying your trash in groups (binary search style) should lead you to the offending file, which you can then remove with Terminal (in case you don't want to do the whole bin that way).

It seems this error (-8003) comes on the heels of the Locum process crashing (a helper process for trash emptying). My diagnostic log shows a SIGSEGV (seg fault) in Locum, so there's presumably nothing you can do to "fix" the issue except agree to send crash reports to Apple.

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