quicker way to empty trash

OMG, 150,000 in the trash! That's ought to be a record. There is no way to speed it up. You just have to bear it. If your boss doesn't want to do it by hand you can set up a recurring job to empty trash automatically say once a day or on every login or logout.

actually... you could create a folder on your desktop... move all the trashed files to it.. then create a new folder somewhere else with the SAME name.. and move the second one to the desktop.

you'll be asked if you want to replace it. poof all gone. then you just have an empty folder to throw out.

but with that many files the move alone might take a while.

but if the empty trash take 5 minutes...

There is alot of overhead in using the Finder's Empty Trash. For most trashes its not an issue, but when the number of items gets HUGE (like 150,000) it can slow things down alot. Mostly during the 'pre-flight' stage. Simple solution is to launch /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app and type:

rm -rf ~/.Trash
killall Finder

This will blow away the users trash folder and when the Finder comes back up, it will create a new trash folder for that user. 'rm -rf' doesn't have the preflight overhead that the Finder has. It just blows the folder and its contents away. I wouldn't recommend it for every day emptying of the trash, because the Finder's pre-flight actually has a purpose (catching files that are locked or you don't have permission to delete for example). For this one time thing, it is fine. Good luck...

Well, I think I win. After the trash show around 1.5 MILLION to be emptied and counting (overnight) I gave up. I had deleted a TIme Machine backup folder Backups.backupdb and those folders apparently have billions of files in them.

I tried the killall method, but it did not seem to work. Perhaps I am not starting in the right place on the Terminal?

I am using Leopard. I didn't find a folder called .Trash under my home, but wwwhn I went up one level there was a folder call .Trashes
[RJR-Home-G5-Computer:> Bob% ls -A -F
.DS_Store* Temporary Items/
.Spotlight-V100/ TheVolumeSettingsFolder/
.TemporaryItems/ Updaters/
.Trashes/ Users/
and so forth . . .

Is this where I remove the directory .Trashes? WIll that affect other users?

OK, I got this to work. Thanks! I did need to brush up on moving around directories.

That took care of the trash on the boot directory. How would I delete the trash folder on another volume, such as an external drive?

How do you set up the Trash to empty on logout?