Mac OS X – How to Restore an Item from the Trash

sudo executes a command as another user. By default (as in this case) the user is the superuser root, which can do almost anything. The trash is located in ~/.Trash. You can delete the entire trash by running:

rm -rf ~/.Trash/*

Open a terminal window and type in "rm " (without the quotes, but with a space at the end).

Open the trash and drag the file you want to delete onto the terminal window. The file path will appear.

Press return in the terminal window to delete the file.

You can remove multiple items by highlighting the trash item and scroll down as many items as you want removed, hold shift key and highlight last item and all items in between will be highlighted. Drag over to terminal, as above, and all will be deleted.

works for me on 10.6.8