Empty trash without Preview (secretly) blocking
Alec Jacobson
January 24, 2013
I run into this problem all the time. Even though Preview.app is not open, when I empty the trash I get warnings like:
The operation can't be completed because the item "some.pdf" is in use.
I'm not sure how it happens. But it seems some instance of Preview continues to run even after quitting or force quitting. I found this out by issuing:
sudo lsof ~/.Trash/some.pdf
This showed:
COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
Preview 73409 ajx txt REG 14,2 18966290 4989399 /Users/ajx/.Trash/some.pdf
Then I knew to issue:
kill 73409
Then I could empty the trash with no errors.