It felt surprisingly refreshing.ĭid you take advantage of the strangeness of 2020 to declutter? The global pandemic inspired millions of people worldwide stuck at home to clean out, declutter, and reorganize, coined in America as "The great declutter of 2020.”
This will require the admin password, but the idea is that it will definitely force the selected file to be removed.Īs always, use Terminal commands with care and only when you are absolutely sure of what you are doing, otherwise the risk of deleting something significant is pretty high.2020 gave me the perfect opportunity to finally sit down and delete files on my Mac, clean up all my desktop icons, and organize my holiday snaps. If for some reason that doesn't work, then instead use sudo -rf*.
Mac users with SSDs won't see the “Secure Delete” option, however.Īdvanced users might prefer emptying the trash via a Terminal command. One method is to quit all active apps and then securely empty the trash by holding down the Command key and right-clicking on the trash icon. On rare occasions you might need to force the trash to be emptied.
To manually unlock files via Terminal, type the following command:Īfter the permissions change, you'll be able to delete the file either by dragging it to the trash or via the Terminal command “sudo rm –R” followed by the location of the file. In this section you'll see who can read and write the file, and if your user doesn't have this privilege then select that option.
To modify permissions in macOS High Sierra, click on the lock icon located in the bottom right of the Get Info window, at which point you'll need to enter the admin password to initiate the change to the file permissions. Select the file and press the Command + I keys or right-click the file and select “Get Info”. If the file is locked, the user doesn't have permission to remove the file or it is damaged, then it is best to first check the file permissions. To do this, simply press the Command + Q keys after activating the application, or open Activity Monitor and kill all the processes you think might be using the file. The first thing to do in this situation is to quit all applications that might be using that specific file, even those that you might not think are using it. What to Do If Relaunching Finder Doesn't Solve the Issue
Deleting a file or folder from a Mac is as easy as hitting the Command + Delete keys, but on rare occasions stubborn files may refuse to be deleted.