Help me with my trash!

April 3, 2009 12:41 AM

I'm using a Linux eee, and after leaving a couple of torrents on overnight, I wake up to the message that the disk is full. Fair enough, I'll just delete a few things: but when I try to, I get the message that it's unable to create home/user/Trash/xxxxxx, where xxxxxx is some random string of characters. How can I actually free up some space? I don't mind using the terminal or whatever, I've just no idea what I'd type.
posted by nicolas léonard sadi carnot to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

just type rm and then the path of the file. if you don't know the path of the file, try dragging it onto an open terminal window, and see if it fills in the path for it.
posted by tumult at 12:50 AM on April 3, 2009

What your distro of Linux is probably doing is that it's putting the files in the trash, rather than actually deleting it. Open the terminal and type 'rm /path/to/file'. For you, it seems like it'll be 'rm /home/user/WHEREVER'.

That's just for files. If you want to delete an entire directory full of files, then do this:

rm -rf /path/to/directory

This will delete everything in the directory, including the directory itself. BUT BUT BUT be VERY careful about this -- one wrong typo can mean the loss of all your data. For example:

DO NOT DO THIS DO NOT DO THIS: rm -rf /path/to/directory /

would try to delete both the directory as well as EVERYTHING in your computer. Make sure you have no spaces and that the end of your directory doesn't end with a slash, and you should be fine.
posted by suedehead at 12:54 AM on April 3, 2009

Best answer: It likely follows the Windows convention when it comes to bypassing the trash/recycle bin. If so:

Hold down Shift while pressing Delete on the file(s) you wish to delete.
posted by Rendus at 1:09 AM on April 3, 2009

Response by poster: Thanks guys. I tried the command line but it just gave me a fresh line and didn't seem to actually do anything.
posted by nicolas léonard sadi carnot at 1:14 AM on April 3, 2009

It will do that - give you a fresh line and no output - but did you check the disk space after doing that?
posted by spaceman_spiff at 1:16 AM on April 3, 2009

Response by poster: Yep! The folder in question remained obstinately undeleted.
posted by nicolas léonard sadi carnot at 1:51 AM on April 3, 2009

Ok, try this:

rm -ri /path/to/file/or/folder

This will delete the given file or directory (and directory contents). But it will prompt you for confirmation before deleting each file, so you don't have to worry so much about deleting stuff accidentally. It will also complain if the deletion fails for some reason.
posted by ryanrs at 2:06 AM on April 3, 2009

Assuming these files are in your "Trash" in GNOME (which is what it sounds like to me from your post) you could also just try removing the .Trash folder from your home directory (don't worry, GNOME will re-create it if/when it needs it again)

from the command line, as your normal user, type exactly the following and hit enter:

rm -fr $HOME/.Trash/

as others have noted, doing this successfully will just dump you to the next line with no output.

df -h

will show you your disk usage, and you can see that there should be more free space.
posted by namewithoutwords at 4:23 AM on April 3, 2009

Just as another thing regarding torrents: If you're using a solid state disk (assuming so given the eee), you're potentially lowering the lifetime of the disk. It might be prudent to get an external harddrive and download the torrents directly there.
posted by jangie at 7:32 AM on April 3, 2009

Once you do free up some space, go into your nautilus preferences (nautilus is the graphical file manager that ships with gnome) and add the option to actually delete file instead of just sending them to the recycle bin. I think you can get to the option in nautilus itself, but you may have to browse through gconf-editor (which is kinda like the windows registry but less evil).
posted by valadil at 8:11 AM on April 3, 2009