Thanks for the feedback; I’ll try to make the usage output more clear in the next version, and the lack of recursive file size calculation is definitely an issue I need to address.

trash -u file per the usage seems like it should delete file and check for update, but it only updates.

You’d maybe think that “trash -l” would give you a size of the entire data in trash, but it does not. That is, it does not account in the size calculation that data sitting with folders in the trash.

Great little command. Keep up the good work.

executeAppleEvent:error: to send Apple events to other apps

Correct, -executeAppleEvent:error: is for invoking handlers in a loaded AppleScript, which is only worth the effort if it’s a user-supplied script (i.e. you’re making your application attachable). Using ASSendMessage to dispatch a core/delo event directly to Finder is the easiest way to go here. One of these days I’ll need to look into building appscript as a static library; frameworks are pretty hopeless when it comes to developing CLI tools.

This can definitely be accomplished just with AppleScript as well, although you’d need a bit more than the script you provided (it doesn’t resolve paths relative to the current working directory and it authenticates the user once for each file the user lacks access rights for).

Good that you mentioned the sanitization because I did indeed forget to escape double quotes in file paths :). I applied a quick fix for that but I also started to look into constructing the NSAppleEventDescriptor manually and sending it as an Apple Event to Finder, which I thought would be the best way to go around the problems that the dynamic code generation brings. Apparently you can’t use executeAppleEvent:error: to send Apple events to other apps but I found some examples of how to get it done with AESendMessage(). Version 0.7.0 now has this fix.

I looked at appscript as well (I’ve had it in my bookmarks for a long time but I’ve forgotten about it), and tried to translate this with ASTranslate:

The Ruby and Python examples ASTranslate gave me seemed fine, but the Objective-C translation didn’t:

Apparently, though, you can just create an NSArray of NSURLs and pass it as an argument to FNApplication’s -delete:. For this app, though, I decided to leave appscript out because it seemed a bit overkill to add a whole library’s worth of dependencies just to strip ~20 lines of code down to ~2 (some might disagree, but this is what I decided). Anyway, your comments were very helpful.

Re. the code generation approach, remember to sanitize your inputs if you don’t want nasty surprises. Or, pack your args into an NSAppleEventDescriptor and pass to -executeAppleEvent:error: (though in this case it’d be as easy just to build a core/delo event and send it directly to Finder). Or, if you’re using appscript (which is more capable than SB), run the AppleScript command through ASTranslate to get its Python/Ruby/ObjC equivalent.