I just looked in the trash and found THIS!

The three music files belong; I just trashed them. But everything else in there was trashed immediately after I reran the 10.15.5 Combo on June 24th, and I've emptied the trash countless times since then.

And beyond that, because those items are all system items that are protected by macOS they were trashed while I was booted into a different volume. (Hmmm... To which trash did they go?)

Anybody ever seen anything like it?

That's definitely weird. Do the system-protected items show up in their proper place in your internal HD (e.g. apps in /Applications)?

No, and they shouldn't. They're all apps, etc. that I never use, so I booted into a clone and trashed them.

Now, the question is, how did this happen in the first place?

It is also interesting that with a few exceptions, the icons for many of the items are the generic app icon. This might indicate they are old, out-of-date or…?

Good question and one to for which I don't even have a guess, much less an answer.

I should point out the ability to delete apps that come "in the box" with MacOS has gone back and forth over the years. Many Apple apps, such as Mail, which were deletable (and re-installable from the App Store) in High Sierra and Mojave are no longer deletable in Catalina. This has nothing to do with their location in the system area, instead because they, or at least some of their functional routines, are used in other Apple or third-party apps. So deleting an app as innocuous as Notes could potentially prevent another app from working correctly, if at all. You could spend a lot of hours reading crash logs to determine the cause of such failures.

If you don't want to see your unused apps, you could move them to another folder that is out of the mainstream or possibly even invisible, but deletion is not a good idea.

You raise an interesting point. Since the icon is contained in the Resource folder of an application package, I would interpret the lack of an icon to indicate those are fragments and not complete application packages. (I wish I could have opened up one or more of those packages to see exactly what, if anything, they contained.)

But that still leaves jon's question, very roughly paraphrased, "Where the h@!! did they come from, why, and why now?"

There's nothing mysterious about those icons. (Sorry for not thinking to clarify.)

I trash that set of apps after every update, and when the next update comes along it leaves a "real" icon for apps that it totally overwrites, and a generic icon for those that it tried to only update but couldn't because the underlying data it was to update was missing.


Well put!

I'm not even sure what possessed me to look in the trash, but it was a fortuitous look.

I'm still wondering, though, which trash those apps went into when I deleted them while booted into my clone? Trash in the volume in which they originally lived, or the clone's trash?

By default deleted files go into the Trash folder on the same drive. So you could have been seeing files in the Trash folder of another drive that had not been emptied. 💡

That's not it.

I updated HD and booted into CCC to delete those items, and they turned up in the trash in HD.

Now I'm wondering if this was a unique occurrence or if it happens after every update and I just happened to look in the trash at the exact right moment this time?

Nope! Not going there.

After updating to 10.15.6 I once again booted into my clone to delete my usual targets and found that I had apparently forgotten to empty the trash the previous time, which I don't think explains why they turned up in the trash in a different volume in a different partition, and not before after an extended period of time had passed after their deletion.

And, by the way, I never got around to posting that after I emptied those items out of my trash...they turned up again.

This time I remembered to empty the trash.