Do all DEs store the trash in the same place?

palordrolap , 4 months ago

Be aware that for some removable (or otherwise non-local) media, some systems will create a .Trash-### directory on the media itself in the root directory.

This prevents unnecessary copying of files from the media to a local disk, and only a few media-specific location indicators actually need to be changed for the Trashed file(s).

The ### is generally the user's ID number as stored in /etc/passwd, and, on Debian derivatives at least, is usually 1000 for the first user, 1001 for the second, etc., but I have heard of some systems that just use .Trash with no suffix, or did so at some point in the past.

Samueru , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

May I know why did you ask this?

Edit: Why didnt people like this comment lol

stoy , 4 months ago

Probably because they were interested and wanted to know?

Samueru , 4 months ago

There is usually misunderstanding behind this type of questions. for example “why isn’t ilike on macos where it is ~/.Trash” and then one has to explain what XDG_DATA_HOME is and why it makes sense for trash to be there (And that it doesn’t have to do with the desktop environment as well).

Or op just lost something important thinking that the trash was somewhere else.

Retiring , 3 months ago

I also don’t understand. Sometimes the answer to a question is equally or more interesting than the reason a question is asked

DeltaWingDragon OP , 3 months ago

I need the exact location of the trash so I can specify it in the excludes for my backup tool. If it changes with the DE, then I have to change the excludes. But it doesn’t.

Samueru , 3 months ago

What can change is the location of XDG_DATA_HOME, (highly unlikely but it is possible, usually it is the user that changes that and not the distro).

This trick fixes that highly unlikely posibility of the Trash dir being moved, add this to the exclude dirs:

${XDG_DATA_HOME:-$HOME/.local/share}/Trash

tkk13909 , 4 months ago

KDE Plasma does.

eager_eagle , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

${XDG_DATA_HOME}/Trash is fairly common and afaik the default in Gnome and KDE

FreeDesktop.org trash spec

DeltaWingDragon OP , 4 months ago

OK, got it

KindaABigDyl , 4 months ago

Also fyi there’s trash-cli

I have rm aliased to trash-rm (not in sudo tho, so I can still force true deletion), so that if I remove something in terminal it also goes to trash.

You can empty the trash via trash-empty

It also uses ${XDG_DATA_HOME}/Trash (usually ~/.local/share/Trash)

redbr64 , 3 months ago

Oh that’s neat! Thanks for the tip!