Accidentally copied 10k files to my desktop - Help Please

[nigelallistair]

If anyone had any advice for this I'd surely be very grateful.

 

I was dragging about 10,000 files (mostly JPG, some .MOV) into a folder on my desktop. As they were copying I noticed that they were not going into the folder but were piling up on the desktop as I missed the folder on the drop. I could not stop the command so I relaunched Finder and that stopped it. But then I noticed the icon and folders previously on my desktop (about 8) were gone but they do appear in the Desktop folder in Finder. All of those 10K files are there as well (in the Desktop folder).

 

Trying to drag them to the Trash gives an error message of "The files you are attempting to move are in use by another application. Do you wish to...etc." Using this I can get them to the trash one at a time. Or I can select them all then hit the "continue" button 10K times. Clearly I'd rather not do that. lol.

 

I located a couple of suggested Terminal scripts that were supposed to address this exact problem but neither worked. They were older suggestions so maybe not applicable to my version of OS X.

 

Any idea on how I can get rid of these buggers?

 

I have a MacBook Pro running 10.5.8.

 

If it matters, all of the files have a size of 0KB which is due to the incomplete copy I imagine.

[nigelallistair]

Seems I tracked down an answer to this that worked well:

 

Open a Terminal window, and type

 

cd Desktop

 

and hit Return. Then, type

 

ls

 

and hit Return. You should see the names of all those thousands of files.

 

If you type

 

rm *

 

at this point, it will remove all those files -- and anything else that had been on your desktop. (Except drives, which show up on your desktop, even though they aren't files in the Desktop directory.)

 

Regardless, thanks to those who read.

 

and p.s.: Always make sure to drop onto the folder!