How do I check where the file in .Trash was removed from? [duplicate]

Based on the previous information, the information about original location is stored within DS_Store file. In older version of OS X it was just a plain text and now binary format and it's undocumented by Apple, however there is a tool created by Wim L which can reads it.

Written in perl Mac::Finder::DSStore project provides routines for reading and writing the .DS_Store files generated by the OS X.

Using examples/dsstore_dump.pl would attempt to dump a store file's records in a more human-readable format.

Example usage:

$ perl dsstore_dump.pl ~/.Trash/.DS_Store

    &makeEntries("foo.png",
        ptbL => "Users/username/Desktop/",
        ptbN => "foo.png"
    ),

See: dsstore repo at hhhh.org and older repo at GitHub


You can isolate things a little if you don't mind using terminal.

The trash in finder is an overlay of trash from each mounted volume and each user. Furthermore, you can see the filename of the file and search using spotlight to see if there are similar files or use spotlight to search in Time Machine to find where the file was before it was trashed.

The pragmatic way to solve this is to drag the file to your desktop and then open/inspect/file it accordingly. (Or to just let Finder put it back and then use spotlight to find it).

To use terminal:

ls -la ~/.Trash
sudo ls -la /.Trashes

If you're not familiar with sudo and that it can delete anything with no recovery, I'd recommend not using sudo and asking follow on questions to learn more about terminal.