Deleting Files – Bypass The Recycle Bin

Ever wanted to to permantely remove a file without sending it to the recycle bin?

If you are answering yes to this question then the following warning is for you.

Warning:  The following computer tip can cause permanent disappearance of files off of your computer.  Always take extra care when performing this computer tip

Having removed myself from any liability I will continue on with this tip.  If you are a moderately confident computer user who knows enough information to get yourself into trouble then you probably look at the recycle bin as an extra fail safe when deleting files.   I know that it has saved me on more than one occasion but more and more lately I find myself finding files in my recycle bin that I have already sorted on a folder and wanted them gone, permanently.

For example, I take a lot of digital photos and usually dump them all to my computer and then sort them there because it is faster.  So when I am deleting a blurry uncompressed tiff that is 20 megs I don’t want want to find it in the recycle bin a month later when I am cleaning it out.  It means I have to do things twice and when I need to look in the recycle bin for a file I don’t want to have to be searching through the files I have already have deleted.

The easiest way to deal with this file the first time is to hold down the shift key when you press the delete key and that will bypass the recycle bin and permantly delete the file from your system.  You will still get a message box popping up that will ask if you want to delete this file instead of the usual message that asks if you want to send this file to the recycle bin.

Hot Keys

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