Whenever I see the recycle bin on my desktop filling up, whether there is just one file or a big chunk of large media files, I want to dump it clean. I actually never cared about how much size I claimed back before or after I dumped it. But if you asked me how to find out how much in the recycle bin in terms of the size, you may be surprised that I don’t have a quick answer right on top of my mind.
AddictiveTips has an idea how to do it through File Explorer. But it involves quite a few steps that change the view options in File Explorer in order to see the Recycle Bin in plain view that you can find the total size in the Properties dialog.
There is actually a much easier way. Just run the following command in Command Prompt window, you will get what you need right away without changing any view options.
dir /s c:$recycle.bin
Or run this just to see the size without the list of files in the recycle bin.
dir /s c:$recycle.bin | findstr File(s)
If you want to check the size of the recycle bin on the other drive, replace c: drive with the other drive letter.
Inspired by this script on Microsoft’s script center, here is the PowerShell code that you can use to get the size of all the
recycle bins not only on your computer but any other remote computers on the same network as well.
$computer = "computername"
$drives = Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_LogicalDisk -Filter "DriveType = 3" -ComputerName $computer
foreach ($drive in $drives)
{
$path = "" + $computer + "" + $drive.DeviceID.Replace(":","$") + '$Recycle.Bin'
$bins = Get-ChildItem -Path $path -Force
$output = ""
foreach ($bin in $bins)
{
try
{
$size = Get-ChildItem -Path $Bin.FullName -Recurse -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
$size = $size | ForEach-Object {$_.Length} | Measure-Object -Sum
if ($size.Sum -gt 0)
{
Write-Host $computer $drive.DeviceID $size.count "files in Recycle Bin, total" $size.sum "bytes"
}
else
{
}
}
catch
{
}
}
}Replace the computername with the one you want to access, you are all set to go. To access your own computer, use “localhost” instead.