"Mark Haney" <mhaney@...> posted
44F5943D.20304@..., excerpted below, on  Wed, 30 Aug 2006
09:35:57 -0400:

> I have been wondering why my hard drive was pushing 90% full on my 
> laptop.  I maintain my system pretty well and knew I didn't have 60GB of 
> data on this system.  When I finally got around to doing a du, I found a 
> folder '.local/share/Trash/' that had tons of files that I thought I had 
> deleted.  I empty my Trash pretty regularly on my system, yet these 
> weren't being deleted.  Any idea why?
> 
> BTW, a manual removal of those files freed up over half my drive space.

That would depend on what desktop you are running, as both GNOME and KDE
simply move files to the trash by default, but exact implementations
differ.  What other environments (well, beyond MSWormOS 98 anyway) may do,
I haven't a clue.

<rant mode=true>

Over the years, I've developed an intense dislike for the trash concept --
I hate it with a passion!  Confirming a delete before actually doing it is
one thing, but when I say yes, I actually want the thing DELETED, *NOT*
still taking up space on the drive!

In the decade and a half that I've been working on my computer several
hours a day, I've only wished to recover something I deleted twice.  Once
was early on and dumb as it was a vital doublespace compression config
file that /shouldn't/ have been still necessary as I'd upgraded to
drivespace, but it was.  I learned my lesson tho and after that, if in
doubt, I rename it to something like originalname.remove, then test and
do the actual remove only if the thing isn't actually needed. The second
time, I had a backup, tho it was a bit dated and I had to redo the
(minor) lost changes. I do /very/ occasionally deliberately use the trash,
when I'm testing removal of something I'd otherwise rename, but with the
trash there, I just delete it, then restore it if the test shows it's
still needed. However, that making convenient use of a feature I otherwise
spend far more time avoiding than I save with the occasional use,
certainly doesn't justify the trouble it is.

Therefore, I always make it a point NOT to use the to-trash mis-feature. 
I've no idea if it's configurable in GNOME, but in KDE, I remap my keys so
delete actually maps to the delete function, not 
move-to-some-obscure-place-where-it'll-continue-to-take-up-space-and-
-cause-me-grief.  Likewise, while they've taken to hiding the delete
option in the context menu by default of late, it didn't take me long
after the upgrade that added that mis-feature to find the option to unhide
it again.

As for the trash folder itself, I wanted something like /dev/null to point
it at, so the effect would be a deletion anyway, but /dev/null/ is a
chardev not a blockdev so that doesn't work.  Instead, I pointed it to
someplace in /tmp.  Now I have /tmp on tmpfs so it's always clean on
reboot at least, but previous to my last memory upgrade (to 8 gig, so a
tmpfs /tmp makes sense), I set something in /etc/conf.d/local to clean out
most of the stuff in /tmp, including the stuff that had trashed, if any. 
(There seldom was any, as if I saw the confirm dialog said trash not
delete without recovery, I'd cancel and delete the thing right, but on
principle.)

On the desktop, I don't like the junk (including the trash icon) placed
there by default either, so the first thing I do is delete it, or where
updates continually put it back (happened on Mandrake, I moved my KDE
config from there over to Gentoo, so had the solution in place and don't
know if it happens here), I configure the desktop at say ~/dt/ instead of
the default ~/Desktop/, which I then ignore and leave to the updates to
screw with.

</rant>

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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