I recently wanted to delete some items from my trash bin and found that deleting individual files or groups of files wasn’t possible. I had never noticed that this was the case as I have always emptied trash.
My trash can had 19k items in it (been a while…) and wasn’t sure I wanted to just empty the trash en-masse so to speak but just clear out groups of files, like all the zips and rars, all gifs etc
By using the following terminal command I was able to clear out files by extension.
find /Users/USER_NAME/.Trash/ -name "*.zip" -delete
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So i don’t get it, how can i delete singly one item outta the trash ?
Ok
You will first need to know the name of the file you want to delete, lets say it’s called photo.jpg.
Then, using the command, find /Users/USER_NAME/.Trash/ -name “filename.ext” -delete you need to change the USER_NAME part to your mac username and the filename.ext to the actual file name, photo.jpg.
Lets say the username is Steve, so we now have the command find /Users/Steve/.Trash/ -name “photo.jpg” -delete
Pop that in to terminal and hit enter. The file photo.jpg will be removed from the Trash bin.
Hope that helps