El Capitan Beta: The “Delete Immediately” Feature

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Oh, El Capitan. It’s the little things that make me love you. In this case, it’s the way you’ll let me delete files immediately (bypassing the trash!) and remove single items from the trash without having to empty it. That’s pretty cool, right? It may not be particularly innovative of Apple to add this feature, but hey, I’m just happy to have the option, guys.

So first, let’s talk about Finder’s new “nuke it from orbit” menu option. If you select an item or items and click on the “File” menu, there’s a “Move to Trash” choice; however, if you hold down the Option key with that “File” menu open, “Move to Trash” will switch to “Delete Immediately.”

OS X El Capitan's Delete Immediately featureAs you can see, the keyboard shortcut for that is Option-Command-Delete. No matter whether you pick from the menu or you use that shortcut, though, you’ll be asked to confirm that you know what you’re doing.

OS X El Capitan delete warning

Choose “Delete” from that dialog box, and bam! Shazam! Your file will be gone completely, and it won’t be in the trash. This is great for when you need to get rid of something…errr…private without having a tell-tale empty trash bin afterward. Or it could be an excellent feature for those of you who use the trash as a sort of holding area for stuff you want to nix eventually. But having said that, don’t use the trash that way, all right? I’m just looking out for you all.

Anyway, the other new thing that El Capitan’s beta will do for us in this regard is that we can now use “Delete Immediately” to remove a single item from the trash.

OS X El Capitan Delete Immediately pop-up menuTo do what I’ve done above, open your trash, right- or Control-click on the file you’d like to get rid of, and then choose the “Delete Immediately” option from the contextual menu. That’ll remove your selection while leaving the rest of the files in your trash untouched.

If you’d prefer, you can also use the same keyboard shortcut I mentioned above (Option-Command-Delete) to, well, trash an item from the trash. That trash will be fully trashed while the other trash in your trash will stay in your trash.

Trash.

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Comments

geoduck

How does Delete Immediately compare to Secure Delete. The latter removes the location and overwrites the file so it can’t be recovered ever by anyone.

George Stamas

Apple is deprecating that due to the the way SSD’s work.

geoduck

What do you mean?

Old UNIX Guy

OS X has had a “delete immediately” feature from the very beginning (10.0).  It’s called opening the Terminal and typing:

rm <filename>

If you want the functionality of “secure delete” it’s:

srm <filename>

Old UNIX Guy

And to add on to what I posted a little earlier, you have also always had the ability to remove a single file from the Trash ... again, you open the Terminal and this time you type:

rm ~/.Trash/<filename>

I’m not saying it’s a bad thing that Apple has added this functionality to the Finder.  I just find it interesting when people get all excited about the ability to do something with a GUI ... especially if that GUI is an app that they paid money for ... and that functionality has been available for free right there all along via good old Unix commands in the Terminal.

Jamie

Same here, Old Unix Guy. Even a lot of Windows enthusiasts have zero idea about just how powerful the Terminal is and have found OS X lacking without ever really even scratching the surface of it. Makes me chuckle. wink

xmattingly

Oh, wow. Well this is a feature that I think a lot of people having been waiting for Apple to include, for a long time. It would be AWESOME if they could include an option in OS X to delete from selected volumes; something I’ve been hoping they’d develop for several years now.

vpndev

geo: SSDs don’t write new data (random, or zeroes, or whatever) over the old data. They put it in a new, different place and that block is linked in place of the old one. But the old data is still there in an unlinked block until the controller reclaims it. “Secure Delete” for traditional disks OTOH overwrites the existing block in place so the data is really gone.

Another way to think about it is to look at the way disk controllers handle bad-blocks on a disk. The controller has some spare blocks and, if it senses a block going bad, it will substitute a spare for the bad one and write the data there. And then remap so the outside world never knows that there was a problem (except by looking at diagnostics etc, of course).

The fact that the “old data” remains for some time in an SSD is a big reason why people dealing with sensitive/classified data are very ambivalent about them. With enough effort, old data can be recovered.

pattii

Old UNIX Guy, your arrogance is showing.
I would not want my Mac using co-workers going into the terminal and messing around in there for many reasons that could hose the computer. Some of them have trouble remembering their own passwords and typing them in correctly let alone turning them loose in the terminal, and creating avoidable troubleshooting work for me. Most Mac users are not Old Unix Guys or Gals, they are just plain users who want a useful feature offered to them in a simple, direct, no b.s. Steve Jobsian fashion. Thank you Apple.

Old UNIX Guy

Pattii - what part of “I’m not saying it’s a bad thing that Apple has added this functionality to the Finder” isn’t clear?

It’s fine if your co-workers (or you) are not sophisticated enough to use the Terminal.  Heck, my wife even had an Apple trainer at their One-to-one training tell her to get the Terminal out of her dock because it was dangerous!

My whole point is that El Capitan doesn’t allow users to do anything they haven’t been able to do since 2000 ... if they know how to do it.

And hey - Dilbert did say, “If you’re having trouble sounding condescending, find a UNIX user to show you how it’s done!” wink

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