Nautilus says my usb-disk has no space when he has!!

The Wastebasket (Trash) in GNOME/KDE/etc. does not just exist in one place, as many people think. Files deleted from your Home folder will go in a hidden folder called ".Trash" in your Home, but files deleted from a different partition/drive cannot go in there, because they would have to be copied into your Home folder's drive (which is a stupid thing to do for files you will probably want to get rid of, especially if the filesystem that your Home folder is on is almost full, and it would increase the fragmentation that your filesystems will have to counteract), so instead they go into hidden folders called ".Trash-username" in the root folder of the drive/partition. If you empty the Wastebasket then they will be unlinked from the filesystem ("deleted", but not "shredded") so the space they were taking up becomes free again. If you plug any device in for which you have permission to write to then the .Trash-yourusername contents will get put in the file browser's "trash:" location and will be removed when you empty the wastebasket. If you don't empty the wastebasket before you unplug the drive then it obviously won't delete those files because you have not confirmed that you want to delete them, you just marked them for deletion by putting them into the Wastebasket.

While this kind of makes sense, maybe it would also mamek sense to be able to mark some devices as never having a trash folder, so stuff is deleted permanently only.

Of course enlighten me is such a thing already exists.

Warbo,

This all makes lots of sense, but it's TERRIBLE for everyday life ... The device is a digital media player, and to be obblied to empty the trash every time I want to place my new musics there is just terrible ....

Why not to make this easy to ther user, following Danny's suggestion or wisely managing the trash-username on the device ?

So my new qestions are :
1. Is there a way to make the system delete (or copy to another trash folder) the oldest files of .trash-username folder, as more free space is requested by the user ?

2. Is there a way to mark a device, so it never has a trash folder ?

To bypass the trash can, just hold down the shift key when you delete something from the USB drive.

So if I have five files that I want to delete. I highlight them using my mouse and the CTRL key on my keyboard (for multiple individual selects). Then, instead of hitting the Delete key by itself, I hold down the SHIFT key and then hit the Delete key. This removes everything from the drive without putting it in the local volume's trash folder.

There is discussion about how to handle this behavior with USB drives in the bug system on multiple bugs, I believe. Do a search in the bug list and feel free to add your comments in the hopes of making Ubuntu better.

To see the Trash folder in Nautilus, just open up your USB drive in Nautilus and then choose View --> Show Hidden Files. You can change into that directory and permanently remove anything that may have already been mistakenly sent there.

If these comments have answered your question, please consider closing this ticket as answered.

Thanks

Good Luck

Jim Jones

Thanks Jim!

I'll follow the bug related!

but in practice somebody can tell me with what command line do I delete the trash because my USB is empty but shows full. Or in windows word, how do I simply format it without having headaches?

http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/8821/

an elegant way to solve this issue once and for all.