Trash on Leopard Stopped Working

don't you just hate it when you can't empty your trash bin on your mac? happens to me all the time, i trash some locked file (or something) and the next thing you know, empty trash no longer works, at least not for that file. it's not really a problem, just annoying. i mean sure the next time i restart my mac my trash bin would be empty but how often do you restart your mac? if you're like me, probably only after a software update that requires a restart =) and in the meantime the trash bin looks like it's full of trash, it just really gets on my nerves after a while. so here's what i did to solve that little annoyance:

1. launch terminal
2. make sure you are at your home directory. do a pwd just to be sure
   
3. execute: rm -rf .Trash
4. execute: mkdir -m07000 .Trash

and voila! my trash was now empty. there was just one little problem... my Trash bin stopped working altogether! now, whenever i did a move to trash using finder it just said that it was going to be deleted permanently. not good... so how did i solve this problem? it was simple really, Finder was able to detect that the .Trash folder had been deleted, unfortunately, it could not detect that the .Trash folder was recreated. a simple restart of Finder did the trick. you can do that by either:

1. doing a force quit:
   1. press command + alt + esc
   2. select Finder
   3. click Relaunch
   4. click Yes to force quit
   
   
2. doing a kill using the console:
   1. launch Terminal
   2. execute: killall Finder
   3. relaunch Finder using your Dock icon

was this really the best way to solve the trash problem? well, it would have been better if i didn't delete the .Trash folder. besides, the problem was with the contents of the trash bin not the actual trash bin. below would be the better way of doing it:

1. launch terminal
2. make sure you are at your home directory. do a pwd just to be sure
   
3. execute: rm -rf .Trash/*

well, you know what they say... learn by doing :)