Daily Archives:August 16th, 2011

Lion Finder crashing repeatedly

Geeky post to help those who might be Googling for this stuff. To anyone who saw the title and came here hoping to read about an accident-prone safari guide, my apologies.

I know people have mixed experiences with Mac OS X Lion, but for me it’s been almost all good, and I’m very happy with the upgrade.

I did, however, run into a curious problem today on one of my machines, which took a while to sort out. The Finder was crashing and rebooting repeatedly, each time asking me if I wanted to restore the windows it had been displaying before.

I tried all sorts of things: moving stuff off the desktop, deleting the Finder’s preferences file, unmounting drives, booting in safe mode… but in the end it proved to be the Trash that was causing the problem.

I started Terminal (which is always in my Dock, but you can start from Spotlight if you don’t have a Finder running) and did:


sudo rm -rf ~/.Trash

…after which my world came back to normality again. (You’ll need to type your admin password).

Hope that’s useful for someone out there!

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser