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Taking Out the Trash

Written by Bruce Brown

Sunday, 14 January 2007

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Taking Out the Trash
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Because we can!

Last time, we talked about basic Terminal concepts. This article, we're going to put it into action. Let's try something that's relatively easy to do, yet requires you to dig into your system a bit: renaming the Trash. In later columns, we'll tackle somewhat more challenging tasks, but let's start out slowly for now.

So--can you change the name of the Trash yourself to something of your own choosing? Yes, you can! Can you do this safely, without harming any crucial system files? Yes, provided that you're careful to follow the steps and guidelines in this column. Note that this change will affect only the name of the Trash as it appears in the Dock, so if you happen to use a third-party utility to have your Trash showing up as an icon on your Desktop, that Desktop Trash icon will still be named "Trash." Only the name of the Trash as it appears in your Dock will change. Also note that if you do anything later on that reinstalls your Dock application, such as reinstalling Mac OS X, the name of your Trash will revert to "Trash." It's also possible that a future minor update to OS X from Apple might install a new copy of the Dock, thereby resetting the name back to "Trash." Of course, you could always modify the Dock again, to restore your chosen new name for the Trash.

In this example, I'll be changing the name of the Trash to "Wastebasket" (Fig. 1), but feel free to change it to whatever you want--for example, to "Waste Basket" (two words), to "Garbage," to "Toilet," or (dare I suggest it) to "Recycle Bin."

First, be careful not to alter any files other than the one we'll be modifying. The file we'll be modifying is a text file, and its name is:

InfoPlist.strings

It's located in the directory:

/System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj

Also, note that there are other files with the same name, "InfoPlist.strings," located elsewhere, so it's important to modify the right one!

Here's an outline of the steps we'll be doing, in order:

Make a backup copy of the text file we're about to modify. This copy can be used to put things back the way they were, should you ever want to do so.
Edit the file, to change the name of the Trash to "Wastebasket," or something else of your own choosing.
Make the change take effect, by causing the Dock to quit and re-launch. This causes the modified file to be re-read by the Dock, which in turn will cause the new name you chose for the Trash to appear over the Trash icon in the Dock.

Recall that, if you need it, you can get help on any Unix command using the Unix "man" command, by typing, in a Terminal window, "man" (without the quotes) followed by a space, then the name of the command.

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