I am not able to find trash anywhere. Can you please tell me a command or anything like that to empty the trash using terminal ?
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2This was posted 3 years ago. We need something that spells this out including what version it works for here in 2017– SDsolarJul 29, 2017 at 6:53
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5 Answers
You can use the rm command:
rm -rf ~/.local/share/Trash/*
The rm command removes (deletes) files or directories.
-f, --force Ignore nonexistant files, and never prompt before removing.
-r, -R, --recursive Remove directories and their contents recursively.
The trash folder is found at: $HOME/.local/share/Trash
Be careful how you use the rm command - the files aren't sent to a trash can where you can undelete them, so it's not easy to undo.
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21
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13Sensitive system folders and files cannot be removed without privileges, and
rmcannot remove folders at all, unless you give it the-r(or equivalent) option. However usingrmwithout proper care may case loss of lost of important personal files, especially if used with wildcard arguments. May 19, 2014 at 19:06 -
8why is this seemingly approx. 100 times faster than clicking trash "empty" in any file browser?– phil294Nov 24, 2016 at 13:13
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2Trash directory has three directories in it. 1) expunged 2) files 3) info Expunged is empty, files have files as shown in trash bin while info has all file names with extension .info Should I follow the above method which will remove these three directories or should I just remove from files and info directories.– MobeenJun 4, 2018 at 7:11
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7Deleting this broke my trash bin: after doing it, I couldn't send files to trash anymore (couldn't write to ~/.local/share/Trash/info/*.trashinfo)– 7hibaultJul 20, 2018 at 14:11
After you sudo apt install trash-cli, you can do
trash-empty
More interesting details about trash handling below and in the man page.
restore-trash (1) - Restore for Command line trash utility.
trash (1) - Command line trash utility.
trash-empty (1) - Empty for Command line trash utility.
trash-list (1) - List trashed files.
trash-put (1) - Command line trash utility.
trash-rm (1) - Removes files matching a pattern from the trash can
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27This is the correct answer. If you have an USB stick in, for example, the files you trash in it will be put in an hidden directory in the root of the device (at least it happened last time I checked)
.Trash-$UID- so in this case the trash is physically in two different places...– RmanoMay 19, 2014 at 5:10 -
5So sad that you have to install a package just to empty the trash. Counting the trash against the disk space is one of the most annoying features of Ubuntu.– MichaelMay 15, 2015 at 21:48
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6@Michael "Trash" is a feature provided by the desktop manager, which is a layer above the stuff that you would usually use in the command line. Really all it does is move files into a hidden folder on the same device, and store some metadata so they can be put back into place if the user would like. You don't actually reclaim any space until you "empty" the trash, which is when the file is actually deleted. Aug 24, 2015 at 20:50
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4It should be noted that this command is user specific. I installed it and was scratching my head about why it wasn't working til I realized the files were in the trash of another user. Dec 29, 2015 at 2:54
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1I find it helpful to run
baobabassudoso one can inspect all the trash bins across users and devices. I've had it happen a few times that files were inroot's trash, which would not get deleted when the user emptied the trash... Feb 8, 2017 at 20:31
You are looking for the $XDG_DATA_HOME/Trash directory. The trash directory is defined in the "Desktop Trash Can Specification" of the freedesktop site. This variable is normally not available in the terminal windows, hence you will need for trash-empty. This command follows all the specification of the Freedesktop.org and it's intelligent enough to find out where the Trash is. You will need to install it first.
There are other tools for this, like gvfs-trash --empty which can also send items to the Trash can.
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@Braiam Can you please elaborate more? How can I use it? I am not getting how it is solving my purpose. Please explain a little bit. And I don't want to trash the items, I want to empty the trash. May 20, 2014 at 16:54
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2@hellodear2
trash-emptyempties the trash. You only need to run it. The binary is in thetrash-clipackage. Is the same as jhort solution just that I explain where it comes from and offer another tool.– BraiamMay 20, 2014 at 18:07 -
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With trash-cli installed type trash-empty I've used this successfully to empty the trash across different drives and numerous locations.
to install trash-cli type
sudo apt-get install trash-cli
Or you could use this script to do it for you.
answered Mar 31, 2015 at 0:39
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Please note, ~/.local/share/Trash/* might not be the only location that stores the trashed files, so removing that path is not enough if you have other partitions that also have a trash folder.
If you want to empty the trash in all available partitions, you can use the following command to empty the trash:
gio trash --empty
gio is provided by glib2, which is used by most GTK-based applications, and the gio binary should be available out-of-the-box in most of the cases if you are using a desktop environment. If not, you can install it via:
apt-get install libglib2.0-bin
