Noodlesoft Forums

Hazel couldn't remove some items from the Trash because the user account didn't have the "Read & Write" file permissions. I have corrected them.

Will Hazel take care of it now? Do I need to do something?

P.S. Is there a quick way to change all file permissions for everything in the Trash?

If you changed the permissions then it should be ok. If you are comfortable with the command-line, then you can use the 'chmod' command to do it in bulk.

If not, then you can do "Get Info" on the files and tweak permissions there. The problem with that is that the permissions UI doesn't seem to be available if you select multiple items. One thing that can make things slightly easier is to do command-option-i to bring up the Info pane. This turns it into an "inspector" where if you select a different file, it will change to reflect it. That way, you can click on one file, change the permissions, click on the next file, etc without having to do "Get Info" on each and every one. Still not super fast but it is a bit less frustrating.

Thank you Mr. Noodle! (I like writing that!)

The hint to turn the Info pop-up into an inspector was brilliant. Unfortunately, I would have to log in each time I changed a file's permissions. Since I have a lot of files, I didn't want to do that.

That spurred me to try chmod in the Terminal, but that had the same problem -- namely, I didn't have the rights to change permissions.

After 30 minutes I gave up and just deleted everything in the Trash so I could start from scratch.

P.S. Thank you for creating this trash feature in Hazel. One of the very few things I miss about Windoze is the ability to empty only part of the trash. I like to let my trash "ferment" for a few weeks until I'm sure I won't need it. Hazel let's me do just that! Nowadays, computers have so much disk space so there is no need to immediately destroy discarded files!

Yeah, it appears you needed root/admin access for chmod. You could use the 'sudo' command to do get past that hurdle but I have to warn you that 'sudo' can be dangerous if you don't know what you are doing since it just lets you run whatever command as admin.

Do you know what is changing the permissions such that you couldn't read/write?

Mr_Noodle wrote:Do you know what is changing the permissions such that you couldn't read/write?

Before I upgraded to Leopard, I changed my rights to admin (for security reasons, my everyday account is not admin) and conducted a thorough clean up of the hard drive.

The weird thing is I tried giving myself the admin rights back, but it didn't seem to help chmod or using the finder to change file permissions. I've never used sudo before so I'm not comfortable using it now.

The good news is that I don't expect to experience this problem again anytime soon since it was related to the OS upgrade.

Thank you so much for your help.