Trash says it's taking up 55 GB when it's empty

[boston04and07]

I've been getting the "your startup disk is almost full" error message a few times over the past few days, even though I don't keep that much stuff on my MacBook Air's HD at all. I did some poking around and noticed that, even though the trash doesn't display that it's containing any items in its Finder view, the "Get Info" screen says it's taking up 55.78 GB of space. I've tried restarting and relaunching the Finder but it's still displaying that the Trash is taking up 55.78 GB. Any help with reclaiming this space would be appreciated!

 

[CarreraGuy]

You can fire up Terminal.app and look in your home .Trash folder. There's also an app call Onyx which can help clean up space.

https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/11582/onyx

 

[Weaselboy]

I've been getting the "your startup disk is almost full" error message a few times over the past few days, even though I don't keep that much stuff on my MacBook Air's HD at all. I did some poking around and noticed that, even though the trash doesn't display that it's containing any items in its Finder view, the "Get Info" screen says it's taking up 55.78 GB of space. I've tried restarting and relaunching the Finder but it's still displaying that the Trash is taking up 55.78 GB. Any help with reclaiming this space would be appreciated!

Do a command-r boot to recovery and from there use Disk Utility to run a repair disk on your drive. Does that report any errors?

If that does not fix it, run the command below in Terminal then post up the output and we can help you out.

sudo du -d 1 -x -c -g /