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Deleting individual and groups of files from the Mac trash Bin

Steve — Sun, 30 May 2010 09:20:32 +0000

I recently wanted to delete some items from my trash bin and found that deleting individual files or groups of files wasn’t possible. I had never noticed that this was the case as I have always emptied trash.

My trash can had 19k items in it (been a while…) and wasn’t sure I wanted to just empty the trash en-masse so to speak but just clear out groups of files, like all the zips and rars, all gifs etc

By using the following terminal command I was able to clear out files by extension.

find /Users/USER_NAME/.Trash/ -name "*.zip" -delete

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Changing the Mac Os X login background

Steve — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 20:10:13 +0000

I recently upgraded to a new iMac and felt it was time to change the default background image to something more “me”. I found a few articles and thought I would post the details too.

Firstly you will need to have the image you want to use and note the name of it (name-of-image.jpg)

Note that changing the default logon image has to be done using terminal as the files are locked in to the root user, unless of course you are logged in to the Mac using the root login.

So open Terminal from the Applications/Utilities folder and you are ready to go.

If you want to keep the old image then it needs to be renamed so enter the following line in to the terminal window

sudo mv /System/Library/CoreServices/DefaultDesktop.jpg /System/Library/CoreServices/DefaultDesktop.jpg.old

You will be asked for the password so just enter it and press enter.

sudo cp /path/to/image name-of-image.jpg /System/Library/CoreServices/DefaultDesktop.jpg

WEnter your password again and then the next time you log in the new screen will be there.

Alternatively there is little app that can do this if you are not to sure about using Terminal.

Head over to loginox and see if this is for you

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Full folder path in Mac Finder

Steve — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 22:53:54 +0000

This little snippet allows the full path to be shown in the finder window on Mac OS X Leopard.
Open Terminal and past the following code in then press enter.

defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES && killall Finder

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Deleting files with Terminal

Steve — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 18:30:57 +0000

My first top tip is one that I have used a few times in the 10 months I have owned my Mac. The issue in question is files not wanting to leave the trash when deleting the contents of the trash can. Generally these tend to be corrupt images but can be just about anything.

When following this method to remove files from the trash please execute with extreme caution. Failing to do this correctly can result in some nasty outcomes.

The first thing is open up the Terminal, located in the Applications/Utilities folder and you should see something like:

name-of-my-mac:~ username$

At the prompt type:

sudo su -

Now enter you password when prompted. You are logging in as the root user to your machine so from this point you must be very careful!!!

You can now do one of two things, either locate the file using the command line or find the file in Finder and drag the file into the Terminal window. This will show you the location of the file. Navigate to the file from the command prompt in Terminal window, using the cd command.

You can now delete the offending item using the following command:

rm filename.ext

You will be asked to confirm deletion, type yes for yes and no for no… simple!

Hope this helps.

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