Unable to delete files from desktop on my Power Mac G4

[Apple-Fan]

I recently purchased a G4 1.25DP and have fell in love with it. Anyways, coming straight to my issue; I happened to download a couple of zip files and somehow I had to stop the download midway and it stayed on my desktop. Yesterday I decided to change the desktop and realized these two files are not getting deleted only. I tried all the ways and means I am aware of but could not do it. I need help from you guys now. Awaiting a quick solution

[Logikar]

I had the very same problem last week. Just like you I tried all I knew but all went in vain. I Googled for a solution and found a post which asked me to do the following. It worked for me. I hope it works for you too.

- Shut your pc down and restart it on OS 9
- Follow the path: users/home/desktop
- Drag the files to trash
- Restart with OS x

Check if the files exist. It shouldn’t. I know this is a long a not-very-efficient solution. But do we have a go? If anyone else has a better and easier solution even I am awaiting one.

[Lord]

There definitely is a better and simpler solution.
All you’ve got to do is to drag the file you want to remove from the desktop to the finder shortcut and hold it there for few seconds. Finder will open, drop the files there. Where you want to put it is upto you but I guess it’ll get deleted from any other location apart from desktop. Try it!

[Felisha]

This shouldn’t work. This is not a foolproof solution either. Instead let me give you a better solution which is sure to work viz; Open terminal app; type: cd Desktop; hit enter; type: rm -rf filename.ext; hit enter.
Here, filename= the name of the file and ext= extension of the file. Enter password if asked.

[TA Guy]

That is indeed an awesome solution. When I started going through this thread I knew it has the solution I’ve been waiting for. It’s almost solved for me except for the fact that I have lots of files on desktop waiting to be deleted. There obviously is no mark-to-delete system in this command execution. But still is there any way I can delete all of them, is there a shortcut by any chance?

[Felisha]

You can use asterix instead of the file name if all the files you want to delete are of same extension , but please note that all files with that extension will get deleted from the desktop. Another shortcut would be to type a few alphabets of the file name and press tab. It’ll come up with suggestions.