Opera was crashing on me constantly, so I decided to trash my Opera preferences. Little did I know (until I was emptying the trash) that my Opera prefs folder contained 38,000 items! After waiting for about 10 minutes, I still had 35,000 items left to empty. I decided to bail out and do it from the command line, where it took approximately 15 seconds! A simple rm -r * to empty my .Trash folder did the trick.
[Editor's note: If you're new to the terminal, be very careful with the 'rm' command. There is no going back, and there's no confirmation (by default). To do this safely, you should first type cd ~/.Trash (to make sure you're in your trash directory) and you may want to use rm -ri * which will ask for confirmation on each file. Although this won't be fast, you'll be confident you're deleting the right files before they're all gone! A wise friend once said to me that there are two types of UNIX users ... those that have "rm -r *"ed the wrong directory, and those that will...]
[Editor's note: If you're new to the terminal, be very careful with the 'rm' command. There is no going back, and there's no confirmation (by default). To do this safely, you should first type cd ~/.Trash (to make sure you're in your trash directory) and you may want to use rm -ri * which will ask for confirmation on each file. Although this won't be fast, you'll be confident you're deleting the right files before they're all gone! A wise friend once said to me that there are two types of UNIX users ... those that have "rm -r *"ed the wrong directory, and those that will...]
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