Peter Tran – Sydney, Australia

I’ve been in a situation recently where I’ve had to wipe my HDD clean and restore my user account back to my iMac via my most recent Time Machine backup.

After 5 hours of transferring data off the external HDD to the iMac, the behaviour of deleting files to the trash wasn’t behaving as expected. When I moved files to the trash icon on the right hand corner or used SHIFT+delete, a prompt would ask whether I wanted to delete the file permanently instead of placing it in the trash. This was not exactly what I wanted. It appears that the move to trash option was affected.

After some investigating, it appears that my home folder was owned by another user of the iMac. Moreso, the .Trash folder in my home folder was missing. Therefore to fix the issue, I performed the following steps:

1. Open Terminal by press CTRL+Space, then type in ‘terminal’
2. Type cd /Users
3. Type ‘ls -la’. If your home folder is owned by a different user, change the ownership to your account.
4. Type in ‘sudo chown userName:staff ./folderName‘, where userName equates to your account name, and folderName equates to your home folder. (e.g. sudo chown johnsmith:staff ./johnsmith)

Now let’s double check to see if the Trash folder in your account exists:

1. Go to your home directory by typing ‘cd ~’
2. Type ‘ls -la’
3. If the folder exists, and is assigned to a different user, you will be able to change the ownership of that folder by typing in: ‘sudo chown userName:staff ./Trash’ where userName is your account name (e.g. sudo chown johnsmith:staff ./Trash)
4. If the ‘.Trash’ folder is missing, you will need to re-create it. Do this by typing ‘mkdir ./Trash’

Attempt to move files to your trash by transferring a file you wish to delete to the Trash icon. If all is successful, you will no longer see the prompt to permanently delete the selected file, but rather the icon on the trash appear to be filled with paper.

Let me know if you are experiencing issues or have another method to fix your ‘move-to-trash’ issue.