Watch your trash

If you're running out of disc space ...

Please keep in mind that many applications with graphical user interfaces do not really delete files but move them to a special folder called Trash or similar.

Unfortunately there is more than one target for these operations:

• KDE uses ~/Desktop/Trash by default, the content of this trash bin can be managed via the corresponding KDE desktop icon.
• XFCE moves files to the directory ~/.local/share/Trash, which can also be managed via the corresponding XFCE desktop icon.

To get rid of all files in this locations you may delete them manually, e.g. via command line: rm -rf ~/.local/share/Trash/* for cleaning up the XFCE trash.

You can read more about this issue in the XDG Base Directory Specification and the related topic in the Ubuntu forum.

To identify files and folders wasting your disk space you may use the common command line tools like du or find. A nice graphical program for displaying the biggest files and directories is filelight in the KDE submenu “Utilities” or the XFCE submenu “Accessories”.

-- StefanHaller - 26 Oct 2010