4 Useful Trash Keyboard Shortcuts Every Mac User Should Know
Nov 13, 2012 - 8 Comments
Trash is one of those overlooked aspects of OS X that you probably don’t think much about, most of us just drag a file into it, empty the Trash to delete a document and free up disk space, and that’s about it. That’s fine, but there are also a handful of genuinely useful keyboard shortcuts that pertain to Trash on the Mac, and if you spend any time in the file system they’re worth learning.
These keystrokes must have something in Finder selected in order to work, whether that’s a single file, a folder, or a whole group of documents.
Send an Item to Trash Instantly
- Command+Delete with any file or folder selected will send it instantly to the Trash in OS X
Return Items from Trash to Original Location
- Command+Delete with anything currently in the Trash selected returns it to the original location in the file system. You can also access this by right-clicking an item and choosing “Put Back”
Empty Trash
- Shift+Command+Delete will immediately empty the Trash. This is the safer approach since it brings up the warning dialog telling you the action is permanent.
Force Empty Trash – Without Warning
- Shift+Option+Command+Delete will immediately force empty the Trash with no warnings, regardless of what’s in the Trash.
Bonus Tips for the Trash
- You can have “Secure Empty Trash” be the default setting by changing the Advanced Finder preferences, found under the Finder menu
- For the nostalgic, a Trash icon can be placed on the desktop like the good old days of System 9 and before by using symbolic links
- Turning to the command line will let you override every and any warning that may be encountered when attempting to delete the Trash, even if a file is locked or in use
Big WARNING here.
I´ve had users erased wrong folders using theses commands. OSX can in certain circumstances be “vague” when it comes to the selected folder. The user may have marked a folder in a window that´s not active. When thinking they should delete the folder in the window out of focus, they delete the “unintintially” marked folder in the frontmost window.
Yes, it was a user that was VERY used to computers… so…
Is there anyway to delete from inside the Trash an individual file like in a Windows system. I use Parallels to run Windows 7 as a virtual machine and I can delete files individually in the Recycle Bin in Windows which contains the same files as in the Mac. Can it be done on the Mac without having to go into Windows. Thanks for any help on this.
Yes, you can and it’s something I do frequently. Simply use Terminal, type “rm ” followed by return.
Instead of typing the full path to the file, simply drag the file from the trash onto the terminal window and the full path will be entered for you.
If you’re trying to remove a folder (or e.g., an application) this way, add -r to the rm command. If you don’t have enough rights to remove a file, you may need to use sudo rm instead.
Hope this helps,
Hayo
Interesting, the post got garbled and left out “full path to file” after the rm command. Guess because I used angle brackets…
Thanks so much, I will give it a try. This will be extremely useful.
Hi Hayo, thanks for the guidance on deleting individual file in the trash can. One more question is whether you can delete a group of files at a time, rather than one file at a time. thanks. Matthew
You mean cmd+backspace, shift+option+cmd+backspace etc right?
I’ve recently noticed that I dont get the sound effect when I use cmd + del to send an item to the trash. Not sure when I lost it? Lion update? One of those things im in danger of wasting a load of time on – any ideas? (I have checked sound in prefferences and all seems ok there) Thanks in advance.