Deleting at once?

This is probably a noob question. I can't seem to delete things without moving them to the trash. Is there a shortcut that will do it? Also, is there a shortcut/way to delete one item at a time from the trash?
If not, is there an AppleScript that will make it? I am currently opening a terminal window and using good old rm. But it is quite a hassle with zip folders; first rm -rf inside the folder, then rm-ing . (dot) beginning files, then going back and rmdir-ing the folder. I could probably make a script in bash or PERL myself that would do it, but I'm somewhat lazy and I think it's bound to exist some solution already.

 

AppleScript would probably be a good solution, and best of all you could probably easily do it yourself even if the script doesn't yet exist. It's amazing all the things you can do with AS. It was one of the Apple technologies I was most happy to see survive the transition from legacy Mac OS to X. It's not hard to learn and there's a lot documetation and how-tos to read up on the web. And I'll have to look, but isn't there an AppleScript studio included with the Developer Tools disc?

FYI: the only keyboard shortcuts I know of that have to do with deleting files are cmd-delete to delete the file and shift-cmd-delete to empty trash.