Undeletable Directory

[Dark Lain]

It's me again. This time instead of undeleatable files I am having a problem with undeleatable directories.

No it is not a system directory. I, in the past month changed user accounts on my Mac and previously locked files and folder became unmovable and undeletable and immune to changing permissions even from the command line. They can be copied, opened, and executed; and the copied versions can have their permissions changed.

Yes I am running as Administrator

I try

sudo rmdir directoryname

and I get

rmdir: directoryname: Operation not permitted


Thanks again for any advice!

 

[robbieduncan]

Is the directory empty? You can't rmdir a directory with contents (including files whos filename starts with . (. and .. excluded).

Try (very very very carefully):

sudo rm -rf directoryname

Only do this when you have backed up and checked twice as rm -rf is very destructive if you get the wrong path...

 

[Dark Lain]

No the directories are not empty.

What is -rf

 

[robbieduncan]

No the directories are not empty.

What is -rf

These are options for the rm command. You can find out about the options a command takes by using man:

man rm

In this case -r specified Recursive, so traverse subdirectories as well and -f is Force to make rm just do it without warning us. This can be shortened to -rf.