Can't delete a directory in Mac

Question

We have a bundle myapp.component and inside it we have a 'Contents' directory with the following permissions:

drwxrwxrwx 4 root wheel 136 Mar 18 15:05 Contents

When I try to delete this directory using

rm -rf Contents

It fails with the reason

rm: Contents/Resources/myapp.rsrc: Permission denied rm: Contents/Resources: Directory not empty

We do have permissions to delete the 'Contents' directory so why does it still fails?

Edit: If I move the bundle from /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Component to ~/tmp/ then It will delete the folder without any problems

Thank you

Could you check the permission and owner of that myapp.rsrc using stat Contents/Resources/myapp.rsrc? — fajran
– fajran, Commented Mar 18, 2012 at 13:31
If I move the bundle from /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Component to ~/tmp/ then It will delete the folder without any problems — kambi
– kambi, Commented Mar 18, 2012 at 14:32

James Aylett · Accepted Answer · 2012-03-18 13:32:03Z

You have permission to delete Contents, but not Contents/Resources/mypp.rsrc. If you do ls -l on that you'll see some more restrictive permissions.

In any case, from an admin account, you can do:

sudo rm -rf Contents

and it should work fine.

This is part of our automatic update process so we cannot use sudo here

James · Accepted Answer · 2012-03-18 13:32:39Z

The file is probably still open.

You can use the lsof command to list open files, and find out what's using them:

lsof | grep "myapp\.rsrc"

Will probably tell you about the program with that particular file open.

I run it and the file is not open by other processes, It used to work well so we're quite baffled here..

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