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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?

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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
  • @PaulLinthicum see update.
    – muru
    Dec 1, 2014 at 18:10
  • 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
  • @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?
    – muru
    Dec 1, 2014 at 18:29

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