Macos – Quickly Empty Trash in Mac OS X

macosspeedtrash

Emptying the trash in OS X can be a long process, especially If you have lots of items (like me). This is after 5 minutes:

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Is there a way to quickly empty the trash, or make the process a whole lot quicker?

Best Answer

If you do it through the Terminal it is nearly always considerably faster:

rm -rf ~/.Trash/*

However it can be noted that this won't delete files that appear in your Trash from external hard drives, other partitions, etc. Those files are stored at /Volumes/NAME_OF_DEVICE/.Trashes/USER_ID where USER_ID is your user ID. (Usually 501 on a single user system) and you'll have to remove them using a second command. (sudo rm -rf /Volumes/*/.Trashes/501/* should do all of them for you)

As always when using rm -rf be completely sure the path you've typed into the Terminal is correct or you're liable to delete much more than you mean to. (eg. a space before a * is never good)

As to why the Finder takes so long, the Finder does some extra work of deleting files from all the devices attached to a computer, overriding permissions if necessary (using a subprocess called Locum), file stats, among others.

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