How do I delete a single file from the Trash?

Question

I'm trying to free up space on an external drive, and after deleting a bunch of stuff, it's still showing very little actual free space. I went to the trash can, but can't seem to delete the files there other than by emptying the entire trash.

Am I missing something? What's the point of having a "staging area" for stuff you (probably) want to delete, if you can't get rid of the files in it individually? The drive will be used on an embedded system, so just "putting files in the trash" doesn't actually make space on the drive, as far as the consuming device is concerned.

Answer 1

This seems to work on El Capitan. Control-select the file, then Delete Immediately from pop-up menu and confirm.

Answer 2

The Trash isn't intended for files you may want to delete later but rather as a safety net if you delete the wrong files. If you want to mark files for later deletion, either use a dedicated folder (as already mentioned in another comment) or mark them with a specific label/color.

To delete individual files from the Trash

1. Open the trash in the Finder
2. Open Terminal.app
3. Type rm -rf and then one space character at the end
4. Drag one or more files to be deleted into the Terminal window ('til you see the green + sign)
5. Press Enter in Terminal.app
6. Puff, files are gone!

If you need this very often, I would recommend writing a service using Automator or getting more familiar with Terminal.app/bash.

Answer 3

You could create an Automator service like this one

for f in "$@" 
do
    rm -rf "$f"
done

to then be able to delete individual selected files with a command from the services menu.

Answer 4

The keyboard shortcut ⌘ command + ⌥ option + delete removes the file permanently. This works from anywhere in Finder (including the Trash) on El Capitan and higher, but not on previous versions of OS X.

Answer 5

What I do is right click (secondary click) on the items that I don't want to delete and then from the menu I get I tick the checkbox says "Locked" under "General" and it locks the item that you don't want to delete.

!

After doing it for all the items that I don't want to delete then I click "Empty Trash" after which it asks whether to delete all or to delete only the unlocked items (which are the items you didn't lock and you want to be deleted) so choose "Remove Unlocked Items".

!

Answer 6

1. Open the Trash
2. Right-click on the item you wish to delete.
3. Select 'Delete Immediately"
4. On the Warning dialog, click 'Delete'

You can also select a range of files by clicking on the first one, pressing 'Shift' and then on the last file of the range. Then right-click on any of the selected files and choose 'Delete Immediately' as described above.

Finally, you can select multiple files by clicking on the first one, then pressing 'Command' and clicking on a second one, then a third one, etc. Then right-click on one of the selected files and choose 'Delete Immediately' as described above.

Answer 7

I tried the Terminal approach- it works as a good alternative to what I do!

I am a Parallels Windows7 user (I'm not really "ashamed" - dunno why I should be- maybe I'm just a Po'ol' Third-Worlder who does not share the exotic tastes & prejudices of the first world haha!)

Anyway, what I do is I open my Windows7 desktop through Parallels and just drag stuff from my Mac (any folder, FTM) right into the Windows7 RecycleBin and, Voila- Selective, safe, effective deletion!

Best of both worlds, I say.

Answer 8

If you restart your Mac, you can delete it from Trash.

When I move an app to Trash, some plist file the app used will be moved to Trash too, if you empty the Trash now, you will get a warning like "xxx.plist is using , you can not delete it", but if you restart your mac, you can delete it, restart system may unlock some plist from system, so you can delete it, also, you can delete it in Terminal described before.