For most of its history, Trash in macOS was an all or nothing affair. If you wanted something removed from your Mac permanently, everything else had to go with it.

But what if you wanted to permanently delete a very large file, so you could recover the disk space, without including the smaller detritus in Trash? Your options were either to open Terminal and manually remove the file using Unix commands, or temporarily take everything out of the Trash except the one item you wanted to remove.

I was surprised to discover, then, that there is a “Delete Immediately” item that appears if you control-click on a file in the Trash. Apparently, this tiny feature was added in macOS El Capitan, though I never read about it, and it took me until now to discover it. Old habits die hard!

It would be nice if Apple published a comprehensive document detailing all changes large and small with their new macOS versions…but they don’t. I wonder how much other new stuff is hiding in there somewhere.

Image by Corey Butler, courtesy Flickr Creative Commons