For whatever reason my Finder sometimes takes forever to calculate the size of the Trash. That doesn’t include the clicks of opening a Trash window, selecting all, then getting info. Here’s a script which is much faster: Faster Trash Size (click to open in Script Editor)

Nothing special, just a quick AppleScript wrapper for this simple terminal command: du -h ~/.Trash | tail -rn1 | awk '{print "Size of Trash is " $1}'

It’s three quick commands:

• du -h ~/.Trash
  Disk Usage, the “-h” flag reports sizes in human-readable values, the directory to report is ~/.Trash, which is the current user’s Trash folder. This dumps a size report for every item in ~/.Trash followed by a total at the bottom. That output is then piped out to tail:
• tail -rn1
  Tail reads the end of files or the standard input, in this case the output of du. The “-r” flag reverses the output, then “-n1” prints one line. The output of this has only one line which looks like 2.9G /Users/joe/.Trash. That gets sent to awk for some simple formatting:
• awk '{print "Size of Trash is " $1}'
  Awk is an amazing tool that I’ve only recently scratched the surface of. This particular command is a really just a simple echo statement which uses Awk’s column splitting ability to quickly split the output of du and tail. “$1” refers to the first column of the output, split on white space by default. I added a descriptive string to Awk’s print command to make the output a little more meaningful and prettier.