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