Trash It! is a little application force-empties your Trash. It also supports Drag and Drop. Especially useful if you have files or folders in the Trash stuck in the trash, need to delete locked files/folders, or want to delete large amounts of files/folders very quickly. If you drop files or folders onto the Trash It! icon, it will delete them. If you double-click on it, it will empty your Trash can. This is the software Apple Tech recommends when all else fails (according to users)!
Trash It! should be used when:
Please note: Older versions of Trash It! are available here. There is a hardware bug with 10.6 running on certain Macs that causes Trash It! to unexpectedly quit on launch. Please use v5.x if you experience this problem.
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PS I'm running El Capitan OS 10.11.4, no problems whatsoever. But then, I didn't have problems back in the Snow Leopard days, either. This is one tough cookie of an application!
Hi Tom,
Gratitude, more than generosity, was my primary motivation ;-)
Yesterday, after (intentionally) deleting a Photos "work.photoslibrary" which had contained about 7 GB of edited photos, which were also previously deleted from within the Photos app, I immediately went to empty the OS X Trash. I was soon faced with this:
Screen Shot 2015-08-12 at 3.44.38 PM.png
I have no idea why there would have been over 840,000 items!!?? Since I periodically empty the trash the only action I can imagine having caused such havoc was the aforementioned deletion of my "work" photoslibrary (not the system's default photoslibrary).
Anyway, I tried several times to delete them from the trash but I was faced with an excruciatingly long delete process. I tried Onyx’s trash removal but it kept getting hung up and displaying a long, inscrutable “Error 1” message.
So, in desperation I decided to try patience. After 10 hours of processing it managed to remove a mere 2,000 items (.24% of the total). It might have taken months to empty the trash at that rate. I even tried to perform an Info on the Trash, but after an hour of trying to calculate the size of the folder I gave up on trying to find out.
I went in search of a brute force method. I'm an old DOS hack, and I've got a passing familiarity with OS X Terminal commands but the fear of starting yet another runaway process that had no end in sight made me shy away from using Terminal commands such as:
sudo rm -rf ~/.Trash
sudo rm -rf /Volumes/*/.Trashes
Then an article led me to your product, Trash It! The reviews were highly favorable and inspired confidence, so I gave it a try. For the first time I was able to see immediately that my trash contained over 52 GB of junk inside a "package".
Screen Shot 2015-08-13 at 8.41.48 AM.png
Within about 1 hour, Trash It! had managed to practically clear the entire trash. There were a 2 or 3 times when the program requested that I "allow your trashcan a moment to reset". The dialog box did not instruct me to restart the program, but I did anyway. At the end the computer had to be restarted and that finished the job.
Screen Shot 2015-08-13 at 12.16.25 PM.png
In the end I had an EMPTY TRASH!
And that's, why I'm so grateful. :-)
Adrian
Then I got the "you can't do that because you don't have permission, even though it's your hard drive" message and the "but what file can't I do that with, how am I supposed to figure that out with seven thousand files!!!?" was instantly bringing my head to near implosion point.
A quick search led me to Trash It! so I figured since it was here on MacUpdate, I'd trust it.
WOW. Click. Click. Password. Click. Done. Instant. Effortless. Saved my bacon!
And send the dev a couple of bucks for his trouble if you can afford to miss out on that cup of coffee and muffin later in the week. (I have no financial or other commercial interest in the app or the dev's company – I just really like it :-) .)