How to Clean the Trash Bin on macOS devices using Maintenance – Addigy

Deleted files sit in the macOS Trash and continue taking up disk space until they're permanently removed. This article walks through building a Maintenance Item that automatically empties Trash items older than a set number of days, across every local user on a device.

Overview

This solution has two parts: a script that finds and deletes old Trash items for every local user account, and a Maintenance Item that deploys that script to your devices on a recurring schedule. For background on Maintenance Items, see Creating a Maintenance Item.

Step 1: Build the Script

Only modify the days variable on line 3 to set how old a file must be before it's deleted:

#!/bin/bash

days="20"
oldIFS="$IFS"
IFS=$'\n'
Users=$(dscl . list /Users | grep -v '_')
for User in $Users
do
  Trash="/Users/$User/.Trash"
  if [ -e "$Trash" ]; then
    Files=$(ls "$Trash") & /dev/null
    if [[ $Files == "" ]]; then
      echo "no files"
    fi
    epochToday=$(date +%s)
    for f in $Files
    do
      fileEpoch=$(date -r "$Trash/$f" +%s)
      epochDifference=$((epochToday - fileEpoch))
      daysSince=$((epochDifference / (60 * 60 * 24)))
      if [[ $daysSince -gt $days ]]; then
        rm -rf "$Trash/$f"
        echo "$Trash/$f"
      fi
    done
  fi
done

The script loops through every local user account on the device, checks each user's ~/.Trash folder, and permanently deletes any item older than the days threshold.

Step 2: Deploy via a Maintenance Item

Once the script is ready, use it to create a Maintenance Item and deploy it to your devices. Here's what the finished Maintenance Item looks like: