It happens sometimes that you want to open a file and the finder tells you: Oopsy, can’t do that. This file is being used. (well, of course in much more professional wording). You wonder, what program is using it? and why the file is shown in gray? You might restart your system saying that whatever that program using this file was, is not going to be running anymore. After restart, the file is still gray and if you try to open it, you will get the same message.
Well, it might be many thing. But one sometimes some files are assigned some attributes and all these problems are generated. Here is how to fix it. First open a terminal by typing terminal in spotlight on top right corner of your screen and pushing enter.
Once the terminal opened switch to the folder were your gray file is. One easy way is to type “cd” in the terminal, then push space and then drag the folder containing your gray file and drop it in the terminal. The full path will be pasted and then you can push enter.
Now type
ls -la filename
You will see in the first column of output some stuff like “-rw-r–r–” (it might differ from this). Check if your file has “@” as its attributes, such as “-rw-r–r–@”. Well if it has that you can see what extra attributes are added to the file by typing:
xattr filename
it will show you some stuff such as “com.apple.FinderInfo” or some other stuff. If you decided to remove this attribute, then type:
xattr -d TheAttributes Filename
“TheAttributes” in above command is what you got from “xattr filename”.
Hope this helps.
Thank You! Works like a charm! Thanks!!!