It’s trash day, let’s say. You set your trash out the night before. Everything’s good. But the next morning, there’s a knock on your day. It’s the garbage collector, and he refuses to take your trash until you acknowledge that it is, in fact, your trash. “Yes, it’s mine,” you say. He thanks you and finishes his route.
Annoying. Now imagine having to do that every time you want to throw something away. That’s what suddenly started happening on my Mac the other day. Not sure why. I’ve been running Lion for quite some time now, and hadn’t done any noteworthy updates. But there it was. When I dragged an item to my trash, it wouldn’t sit in the can. Rather, I’d have to enter my admin password, and the file would be deleted immediately.
A quick search of the Apple forums revealed that this issue has surfaced for numerous users for quite some time now, but there is a quick fix. It requires Terminal, but it’s pretty simple to run. The problem apparently is that the .Trash folder has changed ownership from you to root. You just need to switch it back.
Launch Terminal (likely found in the Utilities folder under Applications).
At the prompt, type “ls -la” (type what’s inside the quotes, not the quotes themselves, and pay attention to the spacing).
In the right hand column, find “.Trash” and scan to the left. If the word “root” appears in the third column, this fix may work. If not, I’m afraid you’re on your own for now.
At the prompt, type “sudo chown yourusername .Trash” replacing yourusername with, well, your user name. If you’re not sure what that is, look in column four. Pretty much every entry should be set to your user name.
Type “ls -la” once again. In the .Trash row, “root” should now be replaced with your user name.
If you’re still having trouble, check the Apple forums for other possible causes and solutions. This fixed it on my end, though, so hopefully you have similar luck. Thanks to the numerous Apple Forum users who posted and confirmed this fix.
It’s trash day, let’s say. You set your trash out the night before. Everything’s good. But the next morning, there’s a knock on your day. It’s the garbage collector, and he refuses to take your trash until you acknowledge that it is, in fact, your trash. “Yes, it’s mine,” you say. He thanks you and finishes his route.
A quick search of the Apple forums revealed that this issue has surfaced for numerous users for quite some time now, but there is a quick fix. It requires Terminal, but it’s pretty simple to run. The problem apparently is that the .Trash folder has changed ownership from you to root. You just need to switch it back.
If you’re still having trouble, check the Apple forums for other possible causes and solutions. This fixed it on my end, though, so hopefully you have similar luck. Thanks to the numerous Apple Forum users who posted and confirmed this fix.
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