How to delete infinitely recurring directories I have a strange issue with deleting items from the Trash. It appears that there are infinite nested directories which I cannot seem to remove. If I try to &quot;empty&quot; the trash I get an error which reads &quot;The operation can’t be completed because the item is in use.&quot;. I tried using Terminal to cd into .Trash and the files are not listed, but I tried rm -rf * anyway, but to no avail...

The nested directories go on forever apparently (it shows 1-36 there in the image, but if I use the arrow to expand the last one then another, and another, and another shows up)... Does anyone have a clue how I can remove these from the Trash? Thanks.
EDIT: After waiting some time I now also get another error &quot;You can’t open the Trash because it’s being emptied.&quot;. Oddball behavior here.
It is certainly interesting to see an infinite folder structure in the trash so naturally, the typical deletion process would take infinite time. Something went horribly wrong somewhere.

What can you try?
Close all programs (reboot if necessary to interrupt the current deletion process) and try Running First Aid on your boot volume. Be sure to disconnect any attached drives such as TimeMachine backups or network shares to eliminate them from the equation. 

You mentioned having tried the sudo rm -rf ~/.Trash command to no avail, but how about sudo rm -rf /Volumes/*/.Trashes? The full article is here in case you are looking for a little background information. Your macOS system will rebuild the .Trashes folder next time it needs it.

As far as the "You can’t open the Trash because it’s being emptied." message is concerned, this is usually fixed through a Finder restart or better yet, system restart.

Let me know if that makes sense and how it works out for you.