make your own Trash Watcher utility

So twice in the last couple of weeks, I’ve found that something funny has been going on with Xcode, source control and Dropbox. The weird behaviour is that both times a whole load of my Xcode projects got moved to the Trash without my knowledge or permission. Fortunately, I noticed in both cases, and while I haven’t got to the bottom of the problem yet, I thought the first thing I’d better do is a bit of defensive scripting!

With that in mind, I created this little Trash Watcher utility to warn me anytime something is moved to the Trash. It’s quick and easy to make, and you can customise it to do various other things apart from give a warning if you like (for example, you could make it delete files of a certain kind, size or date automatically).

Start by opening the AppleScript editor (or Script Editor on 10.10), and paste the following lines into it:


on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving added_items

set listOfFiles to {}
repeat with i from 1 to the count of added_items
set a_file to item i of added_items as text
set stripTrashPath to offset of "Trash" in a_file
set a_file to text (stripTrashPath + 6) thru -1 of a_file
set a_file to a_file & "
"
set end of listOfFiles to a_file
end repeat

display dialog "The following items were moved to Trash: " & return & return & listOfFiles buttons {"OK", "View"} default button "View" cancel button {"OK"} with title "Trash Alert" with icon 0
set btn to button returned of the result
if (btn = "View") then
tell application "Finder" to open the trash
end if
end adding folder items to

 

Here’s what the code does. The first and last lines define a Folder actions handler, where the variables ‘this_folder’ and ‘added_items’ will be replaced by the name of the folder you attach this script too (we’ll do that in a minute), namely the Trash folder, and the items that have been moved to the Trash.

The next line, declares an empty list, so that we can populate it later with just the names of the items, rather than their full path adddress.

Then comes the repeat block. This first determines how many items there are to be added and then iterates over them, applying the five ‘set’ commands on each file. Those five commands are all doing one thing: stripping the path from the item name down to just the item name itself so that we can display it nicely in the display dialog command that follows.

Note that the display dialog command adds a couple of buttons, and collects the result as to which button you pressed. Notice that “OK” (typically an action button) is used to dismiss or cancel the dialog. “View” opens the Trash folder in the event that you want to check or remove the items that have been added.

With the Script editor active, make sure your script compiles by pressing ‘Command-K’, but don’t try to run it yet. We need to attach save the script in the right place first, and then attach it to the Trash folder.

With Script editor still active, press ‘Command-S’ to bring up the ‘Save’ dialog box. Give it a descriptive name like ‘TrashWatcher.scpt’ or similar. Do not click ‘Save’, but instead press, ‘Command-Shif-G’ on your keyboard and enter this location into the box that pops up:

~/Library

and click ‘Go’. In the resulting window, scroll down to the Scripts folder and look inside it. If there is already a folder called ‘Folder Action Scripts’ then save the script in there. If not, click ‘New Folder’ in the bottom left of the window, and create a ‘Folder Action Scripts’ folder (be sure to get the name exactly right).

With the script saved in ~/Library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts/, right click on any folder in a Finder window and choose ‘Services > Folder Action Setup’ from the contextual menu.

This will open a new dialog box with a list of scripts to choose from. Choose the TrashWatcher.scpt (or whatever you happened to call it) and click “Attach”. In the remaining panel, make sure the Trash folder is selected and no other.

That’s pretty much it; your TrashWatcher folder is set up, so move something to the Trash and make sure it fires. Everything OK? Hmm, maybe, but we need a few refinements. For one thing, every now and again OS X will move the .DS_Store files to the Trash, and we don’t want to know about these. Also, it would be good if the file name actually indicated whether it was file or a folder that was being moved. In fact, it does so already (Folders are indicated by a colon), but it would perhaps be clearer and more orthodox if folders were followed by a forward slash, as they are usually indicated that way in path names. To achieve both of these, refine the script above to look as follows, remembering to compile, save and test it (by moving something to the Trash, not from running in the Script Editor).




Finally, with a bit of imagination and experimentation, you could add various other conditions to this script. For example, you could have it immediately delete files that are of a certain size or certain kind as soon as they are placed in the trash (tip: you’ll need to use Finder’s “empty the Trash” command after testing each file for whatever criterion you want to use). I’ll leave those as exercises for the reader, but feel free to post your scripts in the comments if you’re particularly pleased with some variation you’ve come up with!

Happy Scripting!

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‘delete’ doesn’t send files to Trash

 

If you find deleting a file deletes it immediately without sending it to the Trash first, you may need to fix permisssions on your Trash folder.

Open Terminal (Applications > Utilities > Terminal.app) and type

ls -alF

Scroll up if necessary to the beginning of the list and you should see a couple of folders whose names begin with a dot.

.Trash
.Trashes

Ignore .Trashes, but look at the permissions on .Trash, they should read like this (also see the pic above):

drwx- – – – – – <your_username> staff (size) (date) .Trash/

Ignore the numbers, but if the permissions are different or the username is not your account username, then do the following:

At the Terminal command prompt, type the following, replacing ‘your_username’ with (yep, you guessed it…) your username.

sudo chown -R your_username .Trash

For example, if my user name is ‘SnowLpd’ I would type
sudo chown -R SnowLpd .Trash

Then press ‘Return’. You will need to enter your password, which will be invisible when you type it (so type carefully). Now go and test your ‘delete’ function to see if the problem is cured. 🙂 

 

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why does Trash ask for a password? (Permissions Part 1)

 

 

how to remove a boot.efi file from Trash

Click on the Trash can on the Dock, hold down the ‘option’ key and click the ‘Empty’ button over there on the left side of the window. If this doesn’t do it, the file may be in the .Trash folder of your Time Machine (TM) or some other disk.

To find out if that’s so, follow this procedure:
 
1. Open Terminal.app, copy and paste the following command into the Terminal window
 
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE; killall Finder
 
Then press ‘Return’.
 
2. Open a Finder window. Navigate to the TM disk starting from its icon in  the left hand column. You should see some greyed out folders called .Trash and .Trashes. Click on these and have a look for the boot.efi file that we’re hunting down.
  
To remove the boot.efi file from the hidden trash, try the following:
 
3. Go back to Terminal and copy and paste the following:
 
sudo rm -rf
 
Do NOT press ‘Return’. Instead, press the Spacebar once, then use your cursor to drag the boot.efi file from the hidden folder in Step 2 and drop it in the Terminal window. Now press ‘Return’. You will be asked for an administrator password and given a warning which you can ignore. Type in your password, but notice that your typing will be invisible, so type carefully.

Press ‘Return’.
 
4. If you typed your password incorrectly, repeat step 3. If you typed it correctly, hopefully, your Trash is empty. 🙂
 
5. The last thing is to hide all the hidden files again, so copy and paste this:
 
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE; killall Finder
 
Then press ‘Return’.
 
You can close Terminal now.
 
 
Good luck!

how to fix permissions (Permissions Pt 2)

(This post continues from here on file permission problems.)

Did you know there are two levels of permissions on your mac? User level and system level. Most discussions of fixing permissions only discuss the latter, but you may also need to fix the former (also sometimes called ‘ACLs’) for some problems caused by upgrading Lion on top of Snow Leopard.

4. System Level Permissions
You can safely repair your system level permissions at any time, and doing it once in a while is a good maintenance activity even if you’re not experiencing any problems. It’s also the first thing to do as soon as you notice any problems with apps launching, file access problems, or your computer seems to be running unusually slow.

How to do it:
— 1. Go to Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility.app and double click the app to open it.

— 2. Click your HDD icon in the left column (if you have more than one, click the one that contains your startup disk).

— 3. If it is not already selected, click on the ‘First Aid’ tab. Choose the ‘Repair Disk Permissions’ button near the bottom of the window (see the larger of the two windows in the screenshot above).

— 4. Wait for the process to finish (it could take ten minutes or more), then quit Disk Utility. You can ignore most of the error messages that appear unless they’re in red.

5. User Level Permissions (ACLs)
These permissions apply only to your ‘Home’ folder and its contents, and if you have more than one user you will need to do this procedure for any user experiencing a problem. However, unlike system level permissions, repairing ACLs isn’t something you should do unless there is a specific issue to be solved. Problems that this repair might help with include permission conflicts inherited from an earlier Snow Leopard or Leopard installation, such as Finder always asking for your password when you try to delete, move or copy a file.

To reset the ACLs in Lion: (To reset the ACLs in Leopard/Snow Leopard have a look here.)

— 1. Remove the current ACLs by opening Terminal.app (Applications > Utilities > Terminal.app) and copy and pasting this command:

sudo chmod -RN ~

Press return. You’ll be asked for your password. Notice that when you type it in you won’t see anything on the screen. Press return again. If you get an error message, you probably didn’t type in your password correctly. Repeat this step till its accepted. It will take some time to complete. Then paste this command into Terminal also:

sudo chown -R `id -un` ~

and press return. Enter your password again if necessary.

— 2. Press the Power button on the computer and choose ‘Restart’. When the screen goes blank, hold down the ‘command’ and ‘R’ keys on the keyboard until you hear the start up chime. In the menu bar at the top, choose Utilities > Terminal

— 3. At the Terminal prompt type

resetpassword

Then hit ‘Return’

— 4. Forget about resetting your password; what you’re looking for is your hard disk icon at the top. Hit that, and then from the drop-down menu select your user account.

— 5. Go to the bottom of the dialogue window – leaving all password fields blank – and choose ‘Reset’ under ‘Reset Home Folder Permissions and ACLs’ (see the smaller of the two windows in the screenshot above, inside the red dotted line).

— 6. When the process finishes, quit everything and restart your Mac. 🙂


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why does Trash ask for a password? (Permissions Pt 1)

There are several reasons why Trash may ask for your password. Let’s deal with the obvious ones first:

1. FileVault is turned on
Solution: either turn FileVault off, or put up with the behaviour.

2. If you are using an account with ‘Parental Controls’ enabled, the person who set up your account may have denied you permission to delete, modify or move some or all files.
Solution: Speak to mom!

If 1 and 2, aren’t your problem, then you may have some permissions errors.

3. Check Permissions on .Trash
— 1. Open a Terminal window (Applications >Utilities > Terminal.app) and check the permissions by typing/pasting in the following:

ls -al

You should end up with a long list, among which will be the permissions for your .Trash folder. Mine looks like this:

drwx—— 2 SnowLpd staff 68 29 Nov 15:33 .Trash

— 2. What’s important here that the name after the series of ‘drwx’ letters is the same as your user name (my user name, as you can see, is ‘SnowLpd’). If it is, then ignore the rest of this post and go to the post Permissions Pt2.

If the name is not the same, then you need to type this command into Terminal:

sudo chown -R your_username .Trash

Where you replace your_username with (surprise…) your user name, which is also the name of your home folder (note there’s a space both before and after your_username). Thus, for example, if in the previous step it said ‘root’ instead of my username, then I’d type in ‘sudo chown -R SnowLpd .Trash’.

—3. Now press ‘Return’. You will be prompted for your admin password. Type it in, but notice that you won’t see anything as you type, so type carefully. Hit ‘Return’ again. You should be returned to the Terminal prompt pretty quickly. Quit Terminal.app and see if your problems are solved.

4. If your .Trash permissions were OK, then you may need to fix either system permissions or ACL permissions. To do that, go to the next post.



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how to uninstall MacKeeper – updated

 

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Last updated: June 16, 2018

If you’re unfamiliar with the reputation of MacKeeper but have come here because you downloaded it – or it downloaded itself after you were inadvertantly redirected to some unwanted website – and are now wondering whether you made a mistake, let me present you with a few facts.

MacKeeper is one of the most infamous pieces of software on the macOS platform. This post itself was first published in September 2011, and has since received over 2 million hits from people wishing to uninstall MacKeeper from their computers.

When I ran MacKeeper’s free trial version on a brand new clean install of macOS, it told me that my system was in ‘serious’ condition and that I needed to buy MacKeeper in order to solve all my problems.

It seems, then, that MacKeeper thinks macOS, freshly installed, is a poor piece of software engineering, but the feeling is mutual. macOS doesn’t like MacKeeper much either. macOS provides the following warning about MacKeeper:

MESSAGE FROM CONSOLE
12/05/2015 17:48:00.946 com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: (com.mackeeper.MacKeeper.Helper) This service is defined to be constantly running and is inherently inefficient.

If you have installed MacKeeper and wish to remove it, read on.



Preparation:
i. If you have used MacKeeper’s encryption feature, be sure to unencrypt before you uninstall MacKeeper. You should also check whether any of your personal files are stored in /Documents/MacKeeper Backups.

Backups & other disks
ii. If you have any disks connected to your mac, including Time Machine, eject them before you start the uninstall procedure.

Trash
iii. If you have anything in the Trash, empty it now before you start.

You are now ready to uninstall MacKeeper.



The Easy Way

As I’ve been involved in helping people uninstall MacKeeper for over 5 years, I eventually got round to the task of automating the process so that folks who were not that technically proficient with computers could take advantage of the information on this page.

If that sounds like you, then the easiest way to uninstall MacKeeper is to use my app DetectX. This is a shareware that can be used for free 😀. You do not need to sign up to anything, subscribe to anything or give anyone your email address. Just download the app, run it, remove MacKeeper and be on your way.

After several years of testing and refining my app’s removal procedure, I now recommend using it even for proficient users as it is simply faster, more reliable and less prone to error than doing it any other way. The only people who should really consider the manual option are those that are running versions of macOS that are too old to run DetectX.

Please note also that the list of filepaths below is somewhat out of date. Follow the instructions, but consult my post here for the most recent update to the list of MacKeeper filepaths.



The Manual Way

If you need to remove MacKeeper manually then follow these instrutions carefully. They’ve been refined over the years by many people who contributed in the hundreds of comments that follow this post and have been proven to work without exception. However, bear in mind that the onus is on you to follow the instructions to the letter. For that reason, go slow, read carefully and don’t do anything if you’re not sure what you’re doing. If you have any doubts, post a question in the comments.

Here we go!

1. If MacKeeper is running, quit it. From the sidebar in any Finder window, choose your hard disk icon and go to your Library folder. Look in the Application Support folder for the folder inside it called ‘MacKeeper’:

/Library/Application Support/MacKeeper

Drag this folder to the Trash.

2. Still in Library, look for and trash any of these you find in the same way:

/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.zeobit.MacKeeper.AntiVirus

/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.zeobit.MacKeeper.plugin.AntiTheft.daemon

3. If you are using OS X Lion 10.7 or later, use the ‘Go’ menu in Finder’s menubar and hold down the ‘option’ key. Choose ‘Library’ from the menu (yes, this is a different Library folder from the one you were just in). If you are using Snow Leopard or Leopard, just click on the little ‘Home‘ icon in the Finder sidebar and navigate to the Library. Then trash any and all of these that you find:

~/Library/Caches/com.zeobit.MacKeeper

~/Library/Caches/com.zeobit.MacKeeper.Helper

~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.zeobit.MacKeeper.Helper

~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.zeobit.MacKeeper.plugin.Backup.agent

~/Library/Preferences/com.zeobit.MacKeeper.plist

~/Library/Preferences/com.zeobit.MacKeeper.Helper.plist

Be careful not to delete the wrong files: only those that have got the words ‘zeobit’, ‘MacKeeper’, ‘911’ or ‘911bundle’ should be trashed.

Update May 2015:

Due to recent changes in MacKeeper, the following files should also be searched for and removed:

~/Library/Application Support/MacKeeper Helper

~/Library/Caches/com.mackeeper.MacKeeper

~/Library/Caches/com.mackeeper.MacKeeper.Helper

~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.mackeeper.MacKeeper.Helper.plist

~/Library/Preferences/com.mackeeper.MacKeeper.Helper.plist

~/Library/Preferences/com.mackeeper.MacKeeper.plist

~/Documents/MacKeeper Backups

~/Library/Logs/MacKeeper.log

~/Library/Logs/MacKeeper.log.signed

/private/tmp/com.mackeeper.MacKeeper.Installer.config

/Library/Preferences/.3FAD0F65-FC6E-4889-B975-B96CBF807B78

The last item above will require removal in Terminal or turning on of invisible files in the GUI (various 3rd party apps can do this, including my own DetectX and FastTasks 2).

4. Go to Applications > Utilities > Keychain Access.app and double click on it. Notice the padlock in the window is up there on the left, rather than down the bottom. Click on it and enter your admin password. Now go through all the items in the ‘Keychains‘ list (such as Login, System, Root) with ‘All items’ selected in the ‘Category’ list. Anything you find related to ‘MacKeeper’ or ‘zeobit’, click on it, then choose Edit > Delete from the menu.
(Thanks to Al for also mentioning this point in the Comments below! 🙂 ).

5. Open the Activity Monitor utility (Applications>Utilities>Activity Monitor.app). In 10.10 Yosemite or later, select the View menu and choose ‘All Processes’. For earlier versions of macOS, select ‘All Processes from the drop down menu just over on the right of the dialogue box. Next, scroll down the list of items shown and see if any processes called ‘MacKeeper’, ‘zeobit’ or ‘911 bundle’ are still running. Older versions of MacKeeper may have a ‘WINE’ process running, so also look for ‘wine’. Anything you find, click on it and hit the ‘Quit Process’ or ‘X’ button (Yosemite) in the top left corner.

6. Go to your Applications folder from a Finder window and select MacKeeper. Then, hold down ‘command’ and press ‘delete’ once. If you assigned MacKeeper to be pinned in the Dock, be sure to also drag the icon off the Dock and release it anywhere over the desktop. It will, satisfyingly, disappear in the ‘poof’ of a cloud. 😀

7. When you’re done filling up your trash can with all this junk, click on the Finder> Empty Trash.

8. Go to

 > System Preferences > Users & Groups (or ‘Accounts’ for Snow Leopard) | Login Items

If you see anything to do with MacKeeper in the list of items there, highlight it, then click the little minus ‘-‘ button near the bottom of the list.

9. Restart your Mac. Everything should be back to normal, but check the Activity Monitor one last time to be sure.

Supplementary: If you have a problem with MacKeeper pop-ups while using your browser, try clearing out the caches, like this:

In Safari menubar, choose ‘Safari > Reset Safari’. Make sure all the options are checked.
This will not only clear out your caches, but everything else stored by the browser. Don’t worry, it won’t affect your bookmarks, but it will reset your ‘top sites’ and history.

In Firefox menubar, choose ‘Tools > Clear Recent History…’ and choose ‘Everything’. Again, it’ll clear everything out but won’t delete your bookmarks.

Obviously, if you use any other browsers like Opera or something you’ll have to find the same options for those too.

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NOTES
1. If you have any problems carrying out the steps, try starting your Mac up in Safe mode, and then running the procedure.
2. You can safely ignore any MacKeeper files that are in the BOM or Receipts folders.
3. If you have only downloaded the MacKeeper package but not ran the installer, you only need to send the .pkg file in your Downloads folder to the Trash. That’s it!

4. If you are seeing ads on this site, we recommend that you use an adblocker!

Acknowledgements
This post has been refined and improved over time thanks to suggestions and replies made in the Comments and on Apple Support Communities. Thanks especially to Al, Lyndon and Jack.