Pre-Jag it was easy to have a Trash can in your Finder toolbar. In those days, all you had to do was drag the proxy icon — the little tiny Trash icon in the titlebar of the open Trash window — onto the Toolbar of any Finder window. From then on, to trash a file you need only drag it to the trash icon in the toolbar of any window. Slick. Alas, Apple didn’t sanction such behavior and as is their wont, stripped it out of Jaguar.

Now I like that particular "hack" and was royally ticked off when I discovered it had fallen victim to Avi’s OS. But I’ve been looking around, and asking around, and until yesterday could not for the life of me figure out a way to do it in Jaguar.

But yesterday, the December issue of Macworld arrived. In addition to a fabulous illustration of Sal "Dr. AppleScript" Soghoian pulling an AppleScript out of a hat, and the Amazing AppleScript article, (penned by Sal and almost certainly the best introduction to AppleScript I’ve ever read), Chris Breen had the answer in his Mac 911 column.

According to Chris, to get the same effect in Jaguar, you need to use the Finder’s Find command (File: Find or Command-F). Search your boot disk for items whose name contains "Trash" and are invisible. You’ll see several .Trash entries in the upper half of the Search Results window; select the one that displays a small Trash icon in the lower half of the window when selected.

According to Chris and confirmed by moi, the correct little Trash icon will stand alone in the lower half, and not show any path to a folder higher up in the hierarchy.

Once you figure out which .Trash folder in the upper half is the right one, drag it onto the Toolbar.

That’s it.

There is one more thing… it won’t display a Trash icon, just a generic folder icon named .Trash. And even if you change the icon (or name), if you log out and in, you’ll find that it has transmogrified into a folder named .Trash again.

Still, I’d rather have a generic folder named .Trash in my Toolbar than none.

Like fine cheese, Chris Breen just gets better and better with age.