In an effort to recover data from a troublesome external hard drive, I accidentally filled up my Home folder with recovered data. I managed to send it to the trash, but then I didn't have enough free disk space to empty it. Now I don't have enough free space to even boot the desktop. From the Live CD's GParted I can see that there is -no- space left on that partition. What can I do from here?
1 Answer
The trash is usually located in ~/.local/share/Trash
. If you can login using a TTY, or mount the partition containing your home directory, that's the folder you want to delete:
rm -r .local/share/Trash
If you mounted your partition on a live CD, you would need to do:
rm -r /media/ubuntu/<Partition Name>/home<your user name>/.local/share/Trash
or some path like that, depending on where the mount point is, exactly. You can use the df
, mount
or lsblk
commands to find out where it is mounted.
To log in to a TTY, boot into your Ubuntu, then press CtrlAltF2 (any function key from F1 through F6 would do). You can log in to a terminal and execute the first command, since you should be in your home directory.
Instead of doing an rm
, you can always use mv
to move the folder elsewhere. In case you're not feeling too selective, just do:
mv .local/share/Trash /some/where/else
and press CtrlC when you feel a reasonable number of files have been moved.
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You mean mount the troubled parition with the live CD? I've done that and used the command you gave me and is says that there's no such fire/directory. Also, I have no idea how a TTY works or how to even login with one. What if I were to split off some spare disk space with GParted? Would I be able to, say, 'paste' the excess onto the other without losing data; just enough to get me in there and properly empty the trash? Dec 1, 2014 at 18:04
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I ran into a pitfall of accidentally deleting .bash_logout . But on the possitive side I manged to clear the trash and get my space back. Required a sudo though. Dec 1, 2014 at 18:28
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@PaulLinthicum a
sudo
? Were you on a live CD? It shouldn't be needed on the TTY. And how did you delete .bash_logout while deleting the Trash?– muruDec 1, 2014 at 18:29