Comments on: Empty Ubuntu Gnome Trash from the Command Line

By: Chicken Wing

Chicken Wing — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 17:38:26 +0000

Thanks! I had tons of files in there

By: Carl

Carl — Fri, 27 May 2011 17:56:14 +0000

810_98ME2KXP?
Trolling us here? Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2K, Windows XP xD

By: Neel

Neel — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 07:47:19 +0000

I have a file named 810_98ME2KXP_v1.6 in my trash can and when I empty the trash can this file doesn’t get deleted neither it gets restored. It just stays as it is with the same error all the time

By: bob

bob — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 01:32:30 +0000

you can empty a windows trash can from commandline too

By: mordreas

mordreas — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 21:29:32 +0000

worked like a charm, perfect ^^

By: ishan

ishan — Sat, 22 May 2010 01:54:35 +0000

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

this worked for me!!

thnx

By: Eddie

Eddie — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 14:10:18 +0000

Thank you LadySol! I din’t think about nesting the command in su mode. Nothing else worked…well didn’t try trash-cli.

By: LadySol

LadySol — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 17:54:40 +0000

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!

By: Amar

Amar — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 07:28:02 +0000

Trash shows as having items inside .. “2 items in Trash”
And it’s not getting emptied. Tried all the methods.

By: ExoDaz

ExoDaz — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 17:41:11 +0000

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.

By: Buzz

Buzz — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 00:06:19 +0000

Folks, you need to delete the ~/.local/share/Trash/info/* files too.

I aliased it:

alias emptytrash=’rm -fr ~/.local/share/Trash/files/* ~/.local/share/Trash/info/*’

By: Frackson Hector LUBINGU

Frackson Hector LUBINGU — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 16:44:17 +0000

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

By: Keith

Keith — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 23:35:10 +0000

I love linux and these little quirks are nothing to me…. so many positives compared to the negatives of windows…. Do I have to list them?

By: slacker400

slacker400 — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 16:13:17 +0000

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!

By: Keith

Keith — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 03:24:16 +0000

I had a similar problem… tried emptying the trash with the icon and it would say emptying and you could see the progress, but when you went in the folder everything was still there. Tried all the commands and same thing. The only way i got it to work was to cntl-alt F6 and log into another session on the command line and physically go to the folder and delete stuff using the rm -rf commmand…. very strange. After i did that, when i went back to my xwindows session i was able to empty the trash as normal again…..

By: Joe

Joe — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 00:54:00 +0000

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.

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 00:52:45 +0000

Good to know this. Here’s the problem it solves (partially) for me:

I deleted files from my desktop. Unfortunately the permissions of the folders/files was read only. Trash would not allow me to delete them permanently or change permissions. Copying back to the desktop and changing permissions wouldn’t work because that would still leave copies in Trash that couldn’t be manipulated.

sudo rm -rf ~/.local/share/Trash/files/* deleted most of them. It left one folder - not sure why; i’ll have to look into it later. Thanks.

By: Shai

Shai — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 15:18:45 +0000

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

By: coderoid

coderoid — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 13:33:22 +0000

@jake you’re a hero! thanks guys..

By: Jim E.

Jim E. — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 15:27:05 +0000

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