Immediate delete for USB drives under OSX


Okay so how many times have you “deleted” a file on a USB drive under OSX only to find out later that the storage is still tied up in .Trashes directory. Well there is a easy way to fix this. Open terminal, cd to your USB drives root directory (mounted under /Volumes) and issue the following:
rm -rf .Trashes
touch .Trashes

This creates a file called .Trashes on your USB drive (don’t worry the file size is zero). The side effect of this is that if you delete files off the USB stick, OSX will delete them immediately (since it can not create a .Trashes directory).

, ,

6 responses to “Immediate delete for USB drives under OSX”

  1. Why do you do this space talk? I can’t even imagine doing that, but I do have imagines that happen and sometimes it can go into the sky and towards space if i push hard enough and try with might and attempt. in the meantime, you need to wait for people to have imaginations if you’re going to bother with this gribberish. You probably live in a big city and you think its okay to do this, but it isn’t.

  2. Thanks for the tip!! I have been annoyed by that “feature” of OSX creating the silly ‘.Trashes’ directory!

    Admittedly I’m a MacOS noob; I shuffle my USB drive between Windows, Linux, and obviously MacOSX, so this tip is a gem for me. Again, thanks!

  3. Congratulations on being featured! You are very intelligent and have a great blog, keep it up!

  4. I…Love you. So much. Oh my god I thought I had to go to the genius bar every single time…

Leave a Reply