Deleting trash on external drive from Terminal

Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
I want to delete all my Time Machine Backups from my external drive without erasing everything on the said drive. I first put the Backups folder in the trash, and attempted to "empty it" which took hours and resulted in hanging, and the inability to properly force quit programs and finder. I next tried to delete in the following manner(in Terminal):



sudo rm -rf /Volumes/"My Drive's Name"/.Trashes



I then entered my password. Will this do the trick?

I think there's about 200 GB of files. How long can expect the deletion to take? My fear is that my external drive is hanging without me realizing it. I'm lost.



Comments

  • Reply 1 of 2
    endymionendymion Posts: 375member
    This site seems to indicate that the command you list should work since they list a similar one.
  • Reply 2 of 2
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by neuroticrobotic View Post


    I want to delete all my Time Machine Backups from my external drive without erasing everything on the said drive. I first put the Backups folder in the trash, and attempted to "empty it" which took hours and resulted in hanging, and the inability to properly force quit programs and finder. I next tried to delete in the following manner(in Terminal):



    sudo rm -rf /Volumes/"My Drive's Name"/.Trashes



    I then entered my password. Will this do the trick?

    I think there's about 200 GB of files. How long can expect the deletion to take? My fear is that my external drive is hanging without me realizing it. I'm lost.



    This is the same thing as emptying the Trash (Empty Trash is just a front end for rm).



    How much space do you have on your internal drive (or, alternatively, how much stuff other than TM backups do you have on your external) ? You could consider copying your "other" stuff from the external to the internal, reformatting the external drive with Disk Utility, then copying everything back.
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