Empty Ubuntu Gnome Trash from the Command Line

I too had problems deleting files that I had copied from a data cd. some times was able to change permissions till this last lot of trash on my 8.04v. command worked! my first success at command line! great for the confidence.
tis a wonderful website!

Emil: “Such a simple thing poses problems to so many people!
Conclusion: stupid users? NO.
It’s a usability thing. It is much better to have it Windows style in this case: a visual thing, right-click + empty.”

Guess what Emil? IT DOES EXIST. Take a look at the lower-right hand corner of the screen – that’s where the Trash icon is by default. Left clicking opens it, and you can either right-click and choose empty trash, or hit the “Empty Trash” button while viewing the files.

We just find the terminal faster, generally.

Oh, and as for my problem earlier, I now know what was wrong – link makes hardlinks only, while nautilus makes softlinks. Here’s the command you need:

ln -s .local/share/Trash/ .Trash

Using Andrea Francia trash-cli package is very helpful :

sudo empty-trash empty your trash with any permission problem whereas

sudo su
empty-trash


empties **root** trash !

Confirm that Trash is at: ~/.local/share/Trash/files/ in Ubuntu 8.10.

Oops! <user> was removed from the command.

It’s:

user@machine:~$ sudo rm -rf /home/<user>/.local/share/Trash/files/*

Can’t remove anything. It always says read only file system, so now i’ve got no place on my hardrive…

matur nuwun, helped me remove a file that the trash can wouldn’t delete for some reason!
sudo rm -rf ~/.local/share/Trash/files/*

Thanks Lex. Nothing else worked for me either except for removing the Trash applet and then adding it back to the panel.

The following works on Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04
1. open terminal
2. type gksudo dbus-launch nautilus
3. hit enter
4. navigate to /home/USERNAME/.local/share/Trash/files
5. Delete whatever you want

It could be that the troublesome item stuck in the Trash is not in your home directory, but on another hard disk or partition. In that case, use the command line to delete them after changing to that directory. For example:
# cd /media/ExternalDisk/.Trash-1000/files
# rm -rf *
Be very careful you are in that Trash directory before using the powerful delete command as Root.

I had this issue where I had been deleting files using the root authority on 9.04. When emptying the trash I would get an error that not all files can be displayed but the mouse pointer would spin for minutes and nothing would be displayed.

Thierry B.’s sugguestion worked for me.
apt-get install trash-cli
empty-trash

Funny thing is I do a lot of VM work on this box, and it’s been a while since I really looked at my disk utilization. this utility cleared the 20 GB of files I knew about and it cleared another 30 GB of stuff I didn’t know was still on the drives.

THIS IS WHY LINUX Fails to penetrate the windows desktop world. We can’t even have a fully functional trash bin on the Desktop?

SIGH. I’ll keep believing!

This is how I managed to delete the troublesome folder.

In the terminal I typed
# locate brid

the following two lines where amongst the output

/data-l1/.Trash-1000/files/brid
/data-l1/.Trash-1000/info/brid.trashinfo

Then I deleted the as follows

# rm -rf /data-l1/.Trash-1000/files/*
and
# rm -rf /data-l1/.Trash-1000/info/*

This emptied my Trash
Good luck

I find this really useful when working without X running. Basically, enter the following alias into your .bashrc file;

alias ebin=’rm -rf ~/.local/share/Trash/files/*’

Replace ebin with whatever command you want to use to carry out the operation and all you have to do is issue that command whenever you want to empty the trash.

I wasn’t able to delete the plethora of files that had accumulated in my root trash until I used

sudo su, first and then ran
sudo rm -rf ~/.local/share/Trash/files/*

Thanks for this forum discussion, I had no idea how to get rid of the files before. Yeah, free space!

sudo rm -rf ~/.local/share/Trash/files/*

this worked for me!!

thnx