Snow Leopard, Empty Trash and Locum

In article
<chrisellis.northleach-8C5257.09173607112009 DeleteThis @news.eu.easynews.com>,
Chris Ellis <chrisellis.northleach DeleteThis @btopenworld.com> wrote:

> What is Locum?
> Since upgrading my MacBook to SL, whenever I try to empty the Trash I
> find a minimum of 6 items in it, even if exposing the contents shows
> only 2 items. Actually emptying the Trash can take anything up to 40
> minutes, during which time Activity Monitor shows continuous data write
> activity of 5-30 Mb/sec and a CPU usage of over 120% (on a dual core
> machine) being used by the Locum process.
> Obviously, all other processes are badly affected. What is going on?

Have you run Disk Utility to verify the disk?

It's possible that you have invisible files or bundles in there that
can't be deleted. HFS+ file access controls seem to get only more buggy
as OS X progresses. Several Apple applications create them but can't
modify them. These commands will strip away the HFS+ ACL:

sudo chflags -R nouchg .Trash
sudo chmod -R -N .Trash

Some versions of OS X also have ACLs based on the filename. (Yes, that
is dumb.) Use this to look at all files, including invisible ones,
after emptying the trash:

ls -al .Trash

If there are any files besides '.' and '..' then rename them. Example:

mv .Trash/Backups.backupdb .Trash/foo
mv .Trash/.Spotlight-V100 .Trash/foo2

Good luck. Don't run any of these commands until Disk Utility says your
volume is OK.
--
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In article
<chrisellis.northleach-8C5257.09173607112009 RemoveThis @news.eu.easynews.com>,
Chris Ellis <chrisellis.northleach RemoveThis @btopenworld.com> wrote:

> What is Locum?
> Since upgrading my MacBook to SL, whenever I try to empty the Trash I
> find a minimum of 6 items in it, even if exposing the contents shows
> only 2 items. Actually emptying the Trash can take anything up to 40
> minutes, during which time Activity Monitor shows continuous data write
> activity of 5-30 Mb/sec and a CPU usage of over 120% (on a dual core
> machine) being used by the Locum process.
> Obviously, all other processes are badly affected. What is going on?

Thanks to Nelson for pointing me to explanations of what Locum is
although, as a non-power (powerless?) user I didn't understand them!
Thanks, too, to Kevin for showing me how to identify which files might
be causing Locum to be invoked.
I have not yet run these scripts but, clearly, some files are finding
their way into the Trash which I do not have default permissions to
delete. Why? I am the sole user and administrator of my system.
Clearly, also, the Locum process which enables these files to be deleted
by some backdoor method is hugely resource hungry. I hope these issues
will be addressed in a future release.

After (eventually) emptying the Trash, I ran Disk Utility and was
rewarded with the following:

Warning: SUID file
"System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/MacOS
/ARDAgent" has been modified and will not be repaired.
Warning: SUID file
"System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/DesktopServicesPriv.framework/Versions/
A/Resources/Locum" has been modified and will not be repaired.

Since I am incapable of intentionally modifying these items, I would be
interested to know how they got modified/corrupted, and what (if
anything) I can/should do about it.

--
Chrysalis