Emptying my Trash in OS X Lion (non securely) is taking about three hours (about 1.5 million files, from a Time Machine backup). I had to stop the process a few times already, because I could not move my laptop with the external harddrive the files are on. This is also a problem because the Trash emptying is restarted from the very beginning each time I empty the Trash again (i.e., files are not deleted when the Trash emptying is aborted).

I read that it is faster to use rm -rf on ~/.Trash, in this case. However, is this safe? (I am afraid that does OS X Lion performs tasks behind the scenes—which would explain its slowness—that rm -r does not, which could lead to problems in the future.)