We've got two ways to do it: the manual way and the way. How to Clear Log Files on a Mac Manually.
I'm wondering, though, how to empty trash in the Mail.app? I use iCloud, Gmail and Exchange (work) email accounts and none have an 'Empty Trash' option. In OS X Mail I periodically select Mailbox>Erase Deleted Items>In All Accounts. And Mailbox>Erase Junk Mail. It used to be that you could force the trash to empty on your Mac using sudo rm -rf ~/.Trash/*, but it doesn't work in El Capitan or Sierra. If you are running OS X 10.10 or higher, follow these steps instead.
Open Finder and select 'Go to Folder' in the Go menu. Type in /Library/Logs and hit Enter to proceed to this folder (pay attention to the use of “” — this will ensure that you’re cleaning user log files, not the system log files). Optional step: You can highlight & copy everything to a different folder in case anything goes wrong. Select all files and press Command+backspace.
Restart your Mac. Note: We recommend that you remove the insides of these folders, but not the folders themselves. Also note that some system applications, like Mail, have their own logs stored elsewhere. Remember, if you want the additional space from cleaning these log files, be sure to empty your Trash. To do this, Control+click on the Trash icon in the dock and select “Empty Trash.” In addition, some log files can be found in the /var/log folder, but not all the items contained therein are safe to remove. That’s why it is safer to remove log files using a Mac cleaning utility like How to Clear Log Files with CleanMyMac X Rather than searching all over your Mac for log files yourself, you can clean up logs with CleanMyMac X in just 4 steps. And that’s not all it does!
Anyway, to clean them up with CleanMyMac X:. and launch it. Choose System Junk in the left menu.
Click Scan at the bottom of CleanMyMac X. If you’d like to remove only log files and nothing else, click on Review Details before clicking Clean. Deselect everything except for System Log Files and User Log Files, and then click Clean. Make sure that once you have finished clearing out these logs for additional hard drive space, you empty out your Trash. To do this, Control-click on the Trash icon in the dock and select “Empty Trash.” Restart your Mac afterward so your Mac can begin to create new log files. Cleaning up log files with is as easy as can be. And, like we said before, it can do so much more, too!
With CleanMyMac X, you can clean up outdated apps, language packs, universal binaries, and gigabytes of useless junk you didn’t even know you had. And feel what it’s like to have a faster, cleaner Mac. These might also interest you:.
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If you do it through the Terminal it is nearly always considerably faster: rm -rf /.Trash/. However it can be noted that this won't delete files that appear in your Trash from external hard drives, other partitions, etc. Those files are stored at /Volumes/NAMEOFDEVICE/.Trashes/USERID where USERID is your user ID.
(Usually 501 on a single user system) and you'll have to remove them using a second command. ( sudo rm -rf /Volumes/./.Trashes/501/. should do all of them for you) As always when using rm -rf be completely sure the path you've typed into the Terminal is correct or you're liable to delete much more than you mean to.
A space before a. is never good) As to why the Finder takes so long, the Finder does some extra work of deleting files from all the devices attached to a computer, overriding permissions if necessary (using a subprocess called Locum), file stats, among others. If you need to empty the Trash of a mounted volume when using Finder in root mode (see ), it seems you can't just press Empty Trash in the Trash folder after pressing the icon (even ensuring the normal Finder isn't open). You will hear the trash emptying sound, but the trash does not get emptied.
Also, when browsing Finder in root mode doesn't show the hidden files and folders, even if you have enabled this option in your own user account. Following Chealion's rm command with the asterisk at the end didn't seem to work for me.
(Perhaps it was due to the double quotation marks at the ends; perhaps it needed the backslash format as demonstrated below.) Instead, I had to manually add the folder name; in my case: sudo rm -rf /Volumes/Backup of Macintosh HD/.Trashes/0/CCC Archives (0 is the root user) Which maps out to this, I guess: sudo rm -rf /Volumes/VOLUME NAME/.Trashes/0/FOLDER OR FILE NAME The asterisk wildcard not working might be a pain if you have many files and/or folders in the root Trash of a mounted volume. CAUTION: Using Finder in root mode is definitely ill-advised for general use; use it in special circumstances. In my case, I wanted to backup and delete my Carbon Copy Cloner archived files (created in incremental backups), as just copying and pasting the 'CCC Archives' folder to a separate location threw up a load of errors while using Finder in normal user mode. I didn't have much luck with chown or cp under sudo either. So that's why I resorted to using root-mode Finder.
![Mac Os X Yosemite Auto Empty Trash App For Mac Mac Os X Yosemite Auto Empty Trash App For Mac](http://cdn.osxdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/delete-all-email-from-mac-mail-app-osx.jpg)
I am on Mac OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard, backing up my drive before the impending 10.7 Lion release.