Ever gotten this pestering error when trying to throw something away in Mac OS X? I even see this behavior persistent in OS X 10.9 Mavericks, the newest release. I believe it has something to do with Finder's quicklook function. While relaunching the Finder is always a solution, I wanted to present this terminal based solution as a faster alternative.
So, see this error?
All you've gotta do is open up Terminal.app (click Spotlight menu at the top right of your screen and type in terminal: sudo rm -rf /Path/to/the/thing
.
Be warned that this will delete everything in the directory you specify, so make sure you really want to delete it!