When a file is deleted on an iphone, ipad, or ipod, it is moved to the .trashes\ 501 folder.

How to restore a user's .Trash folder

Dec 20, '06 07:30:00AM • Contributed by:

Summary: If you delete the trash folder (

~/.Trash

) and then recreate it, you must restart Finder before you can drag things to the Trash icon again.

Background/Explanation: I've been doing some disk housekeeping: deleting files, moving them around on external drives, etc. I somehow ended up with a copy of the Desktop DB file in the Trash. The file wasn't visible, but whenever I emptied the Trash, I got the annoying message The operation cannot be completed because the item Desktop DB is in use."

After clicking Continue, the Trash icon reverted to its apparently empty state, but the next time I put something in it and went to delete it, the same message appeared. I dropped to Terminal and thought I would just delete the file there, but it wasn't there. So I simply ran:

$ rm -rf ~/.Trash/ mkdir ~/.Trash/

Thinking that would solve the problem, and it did.

Except that the Finder was smart enough to tell that the

~/.Trash

folder had been deleted, but not smart enough to tell that a new one had been created. So when I tried to drag a file there, I was told The file WHATEVER will be deleted immediately, continue?. I had to restart Finder (Option click-and-hold on its dock icon) to get it to work again.

[robg adds: I'm not sure I can explain why the Desktop DB file wouldn't have been visible. If you manually recreate your trash, you might also want to run

chmod go= ~/.Trash

, to remove all permissions from group and others. That will match the stock permissions on that folder. I'm not sure if Repair Permissions would catch this one or not.]

    

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• #1

Greetings!

I just discovered something that seems odd to me. I searching for some long forgotten files, the search results included some files that I had at one time moved to my iPod for back up, but then later deleted.

They show up as in Trashes -> 501 -> and then the file name.

501 is never a name I used for filing purposes.

I have emptied the trash, but these files remain.

Just to further test, I decided to also trash the folder with all my old OS 9 apps (when's the last time I fired up OS 9???). The folder is gone from the finder view of the iPod files, but again still appear in Trashes -> 501.

How do I get these files gone for good and free up that space on my iPod???

Any ideas? I'm mystified!

Thanks!
Tami

• #2

err, screenshots please? this is hard to believe!!! which ipod is this?

• #3

Well, I think I figured out the problem.

In shuttling and backing things up I had some dupe files in a folder I had called "for Desktop" because that's where they had lived.

I did discover, after your post and going back to do a screenshot, that apparently the old OS 9 apps folder and it's contents were indeed gone and I could no longer find a trace of them.

So... I thought, what's different about these others? The word "desktop" in the name? Sure enough, I changed the name of the folder, executed "move to trash" and they are now gone... or at least not visible.

The only thing that is still somewhat odd to me is that this freed up very little space on the iPod.

I have plenty of space, so that's not really a problem, just makes me wonder...

Anyway, this is a 60gb video iPod.

Thanks!

err, screenshots please? this is hard to believe!!! which ipod is this?

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Question:

Question: \.Trashes\501 files

I’ve got an Ipod shuffle gen 2 that I use for both Itunes and for data, exchanging the files between Mac OSX Tiger and XP Pro SP2. On it there’s a folder \.Trashes\501 that has about 503 MB of files in it that seem to be just taking up space. XP reports only about 12MB free on the entire Ipod.
Can I delete the files within the \.Trashes\501 folder in XP with no harm to the Ipod or Itunes? Will OSX still see the other data files and Itunes files? Thanks.

mac pro, Mac OS X (10.4.9)

Posted on Apr 7, 2008 1:33 PM