Hi Phil and Sarah, To find out the total storage used for the Trash, from Finder, use the Command-Shift-G "Go to folder" shortcut and type or paste in: ~/.Trash and press return. (That's tilde slash period "Trash", where the leading tilde and slash indicates this is a folder under your user account, and the period at the start of the name indicates it is a "dot file" or "hidden file or folder".)
Then do Command-I to "Get Info" on the folder and read off the size. When you're done, use Command-W to close the "Get Info" window. This method of selecting a folder in Finder and using Command-I to get information on the size works for any folder on your Mac. The only tricky part is knowing the name and path of the trash folder. You can also do a lot of these operations in Terminal, since none of the files are hidden there. If I opened Terminal, I'd probably type a command like: du -s -h .Trash and press return. The two-letter "du" command tells me about disk usage. The flag key "-s" gives this as a summary (e.g., the total instead of item by item size information on every file or folder in this directory). The "-h" key gives this in "human readable" format -- MB instead of blocks. And the final argument is the name of the folder, which is ".Trash". I open Terminal in my home directory, so I don't need a prefix to the path. If I want to use a version of the command that works from any file, I'd write the file name as "~/.Trash" (that's tilde, slash, dot, "Trash"). When you work in Terminal you want to make your commands case sensitive, so use a capital "T" for "Trash". There's a very good post in the archives that Travis wrote up about the best settings to use when using the Terminal with VoiceOver. I can probably dig up the link to the post in old archives if you need this. (This predates the use of the easily searchable Mail Archive as a secondary archive for the list.) HTH. Cheers, Esther <--- Mac Access At Mac Access Dot Net ---> To reply to this post, please address your message to [email protected] You can find an archive of all messages posted to the Mac-Access forum at either the list's own dedicated web archive: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/mac-access/index.html> or at the public Mail Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/>. Subscribe to the list's RSS feed from: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.xml> The Mac-Access mailing list is guaranteed malware, spyware, Trojan, virus and worm-free! Please remember to update your membership options periodically by visiting the list website at: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/mac-access/options/>
