Shouldn't put .Trash-$USER on removable devices

Right, that's a known upstream issue:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=138058

BTW you can use shift-del to delete without using the trash.

*** Bug 14551 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

In the meantime, isn't it possible to patch it in 5.04 so the default delete
action -really- deletes it? So we don't have to use shift-del, and won't have to
wait for 5.10.

*** Bug 22092 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 24541 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

fwiw, the traditional argument against using the user's trash folder in their homedir is that it would take a long time to copy the files off of the usb device onto the local filesystem. flat-out delete is probably best.

The question is to know if it should open the dialog saying you will really delete your files or just do it

Nautilus prompts when deleting files off "network drives", I'd just have it behave the same way for the removable drive case.

This is a must fix for Dapper, although it hasn't been fixed in Gnome yet. It really confuses the end-users when they delete files on an usb stick and they do not have new free space on it and nothing is in the Trash. As mentioned above, Nautilus does have a function to delete files directly.

Martin, thanks for you interest on Ubuntu. Please don't force the settings over maintainer. If you click on the Ubuntu task you will notice that the milestone is set to dappern which already means that. Letting as major since it can be considered as confusing for new users and has some duplicates now :)

Merci Sebastien, excuse moi :-)

There seems to be a different, better behavior in Dapper now.
The .trash-$USER folder is still being created on the removeable drive, but the "deleted" or "moved to trash" files also show up in the "global" wastebasket.
I think this behavior makes more sense.

:)
clast

I disagree.

I still have to have the device connected to delete the files from the trash.

And the files are still left on the device after I thought I deleted them.

Also there doesn't seem to be any way to empty the Trash of the removable device to clean it up, without losing anything important in the trash from my main home directory which I might not wish to delete yet.

And this is still going to be confusing to a user coming from OSX or win32 where the behavior is immediate deletion for (most) external devices.

I think USB HD is an exception, although I don't know what fields they classify on.

I am all for bypassing the recycle bin on removable drives, though it seems like a bit of a deviation from how things work elsewhere (I don't know aboyt network drives or other not-always-available storage).

How about different delete file dialog box for removable drives with an checkbox for "Bypass the recycle bin for delated files on removable devices" so users can choose their preferred behaviour.

Some ideas:

1) Does .Trash-desrt ever have a good purpose?
  - is created when files are not on same FS as homedir?
  - is it useful for something like /mnt/windows?
    - will this clutter up your c:\ drive?
  - maybe just never create this directory

2) Maybe don't create .Trash-desrt if the drive is on USB.

3) Maybe don't create .Trash-desrt if the drive is smaller than a certain size (2-3GB?)

4) Combination of 2&3 (so that USB harddrives still get it created).

The answer to what should be done probably lies somewhere in the above.

This isn't just confusing for people coming from OS X and Win32, but also for Ubuntu users who plug their drives into those machines, because now there is some mysterious .Trash folder and they don't have the amount of space they thought they did. A lot of people move presentations and such through pen drives, and although they may author it on an Ubuntu machine they are very likely going to be presenting on a Windows one.

Because the windows recycle bin doesn't obey the .Trash spec, emptying the recycle bin doesn't free up the space on the pen drive either. So even how to empty the 'trash' for the pen drive is going to be inconsistent if it stays this way.

It's also probably a bad idea because most pen drives are flash based and have a limited number of writes. Creating .Trash and the file moves cause extra, uneeded writes.

This behavious has been changed. Trash is now moved to the $USER .Trash directory.

Please change to fix-released

Duncan: Perhaps you have misunderstood the bug. The bug still exists -- a .Trash-$USER directory is still created on removable devices such as USB flash drives when "Move to wastebasket" is used on a file on that drive.

Yes, the bug definitely still exists. There has been some talk on this bug of fixing this for Dapper, was there any progress? It is very frustrating to have to manually delete files in .Trash-$USER (deleted files do not show up in the trash-applet either, bug #32466).

Both these bugs have _many_ duplicates and lots of comments, so this is obviously a serious bug.

Matt

Matthew, I had a look on that but the code is not trivial, if you have any patch you are welcome. I mailed upstream with some questions on the best place to hack that change but didn't get a reply yet and I prefer to get their opinion before doing that change

On Sun, 2006-05-28 at 15:36 +0000, Sebastien Bacher wrote:
> I had a look on that but the code is not trivial

Ok, thanks for taking a look at it, with luck someone will come up with
a solution and it will get into a future release!

Matt

I confirm, this bug still exists.
On the forums I see cases of people thinking their memory sticks are faulty. Other people try to help, some advising to reformat etc.
This bug causes problems.

I confirm here as well. This bug is annoying

Stefan, if you read the bug you will notice than the bug has already been confirmed so no need to comment twice saying it's annoying, people don't fix it because they don't want to, there is just many things to do for the number of people so that takes time

ok, sorry sebastien, i' m realy new here, i didn't notice the bug was already confirmed... you do a great job with ubuntu, thank you all

no problem, thank you for your interest to Ubuntu :)

I think the default Dapper behaviour makes sense.

If I put an file on my removable device into the Trash, and then walk to another machine, it's very convenient that the file appears in the trash on that machine too.

Most people are only upset about this because USB mass-storage cameras aren't handled well in Ubuntu. *Cameras and MP3 players* should not allow .Trash-$USER to exist - plain USB keys should.

Perhaps the .Trash file should just be renamed Trash? Then people can _see_ that it's there, isn't that what's most important?

I agree that by changing .Trash to Trash, and therefore making "visible" to the user, would be a bit more intuitive, but if the user clicks on the garbage bin icon (in the lower right hand corner), it will display the contents of the .Trash as well. I guess a "not so computer savy" user would most likely click on that icon that browse/search for the .Trash directory within their removable device.

Just my 2 cents.

Cheers,

Og

As a quick fix / reminder I put ".Trash-$USER" read-only on my usb sticks. I get an error when I try to delete stuff with nautilus. Then I just shift-delete to delete it directly instead of move to trash.

It took me a good few hours to figure out why my second hard drive was still full after deleting everything. (everything was in the hidden .Trash-me folder)

Nautilus should instead move the file to the user's local trash (located ~/.Trash) as this would be the expected functionality and would keep the backup of the deleted files. If there is not enough room in the local drive then prompt the user saying "The file x cannot be moved to the trash. Delete them anyway? You will not be able to recover it. [Skip] [Skip All] [Delete] [Delete All] [Cancel]".

If moving the file from the removable disk to the local trash is logically impossible, Nautilus should just delete the file.

I think it's a viable solution to move the files to the user's home directory .Trash, and this is what Dapper does now. BUT, the files aren't even deleted "permanently" from the flash disk. Can it move them to the home directory trash and clean up the unused space on the memory stick? Is that possible? By the way I don't use digital cameras or mp3 players - this behaviour is annoying the hell out of me for plain old memory sticks.

I think moving any deleted files to ~/.Trash (one central place) would be nice and solve two bugs at the same time...

From description of bug# 32466:
> When I attach an usb stick and delete some files on it. The files are moved to the trash,
> but the trash-applet still says: There are no objects.

trash-applet says "there are no objects" because it looks at ~/.Trash , which is the proper place to look. I guess this issue would be resolved if trash of removable drives is located at ~/.Trash as well, instead of /media/drive/.Trash

From description of this bug
> Ty digital camera card is full after deleting
> all the pictures, and my iAudio still plays deleted files.
> This is because instead of deleting files from removal devices, Nautilus creates
> a .Trash-$USER directory and moves the files into there.

iAudio still plays deleted files or the digital camera is still full bc the trash is created at /media/drive/.Trash - If deleted items were moved to one central place ~/.Trash, this wouldn't be a problem. The camera/iaudio would be emptied even without "real_delete_if_drive_removable" (which is a very bad idea imho).

I personnally don't think it's a good idea at all to move files from a removable device to ~/.Trash. Moving big files from USB1.0 cameras can be really long and annoying. Also, imho it just doesn't make sense to transfer files to another device when the user really wants to delete them.

There has to be some more creative way to manage this. Quick idea: maybe a delay could be put on the delete dialog when the files are on a removable device such as camera or usb stick. (I don't like this either, but it's the lesser of two evils imo)

There should be a deeper search for a coherent and usable solution.

P.S.: No OS/WM that I know of has this behavior.

ok, what if you "unhide" /media/device/.Trash by default? It would be /media/device/Trash (is this possible with gnome?) so the user will be able to see it and understand why the camera is still full (or) why the iAudio is still playing deleted files. as long as you don't do _really_delete_those_files :)

I don't see a problem with actually deleting the files as long as the user is warned that this is what's going to happen and asked if he's sure.

Le mardi 19 septembre 2006 à 15:32 +0000, towsonu2003 a écrit :
> ok, what if you "unhide" /media/device/.Trash by default?

what is the issue with opening the dialog mentionning the files will be
dropped and not moved to the crash and really delete them by default?

The problem cannot be reduced to a wide system setting. Here we talk of removable media, it meens you take it and plug it wherever you want on multiple PCs. If you don't want a .Trash on your usb stick, you don't want it whatever the Ubuntu where you plug it. It means that what is needed here is a configuration file on the USB stick to prevent the .Trash creation. You can also imagine other settings like preventing the automounting of the volume. I get multiple Ubuntus and it's what I need.

Just a little thing: A few months ago i did’t knew, that this bug exists (well, some people call it a feature, but if it’s not and optoin, its a FEARture, vulgo: a bug *g*), and deleted some stuff. The time goes by and i didn’t rememberred this .Trash-user folder on my stick. i gave my stick to another person, and the fist thing, he saw was the .Trash-user folder (because Windows don’t hides folders started by a dot), and - of course - opened it. It was kinda embarrassing for me, that a co-worker saw me in somewhat awkward positions ...

Tha fact, that there is a .Trash-user folder on the drive should be communicated more and made totally clear to the users, or there should be no .Trash-user folder at all.

Yes, that's happened to me as well. A classmate loading a presentation from my USB drive with a running projector, and navigating into my .Trash folder because it wasn't hidden on Windows (in front of everyone). Could have been more embarrassing than it was.

I would vote for a default "deletions from an external drive are permanent" setting, or some other set of changes that make dot-folders hidden on FAT32 drives.

This bug is also very annoying. I delete songs on my MP3 player but... hold on... WHY is it still playing!? That's right, there's a hidden folder. It doesn't prompt me to empty the trash when I mount or unmount it, which would be a lot better.

When i unmount USB harddrive it prompts me if i wish to delete the files currently in the trash.
Nautilus 2.22.2

But not if an other user put files to the Trash and has not removed them at unmount time. When you unmount it then, you do not get such a message. And that is what this bug report is about. Sadly there since 2005.

Actually it also doesn't happen if the user unmounts the volume from a nautilus browser window instead of from the Desktop. It seems the fix they put in was put into the nautilus desktop code rather than the gnome-mount code. This should be corrected.

I agree with this bug's title, removable devices shouldn't have a .trash folder on it. At least I must to have an option to choose if the folder will be created or not.

Isn't this already fixed? You get prompted to clear the trash at unmount.

Closing since this is fixed. Thanks for reporting

On Thu, 2009-01-22 at 19:57 +0000, Martin Mai wrote:

> Closing since this is fixed. Thanks for reporting
>
> ** Changed in: nautilus (Ubuntu)
> Status: Triaged => Fix Released
>
This is not fixed.

 status triaged

Scott
--
Scott James Remnant
<email address hidden>

I am sorry, Scott, I see what you mean, because the fix is just a workaround (It prompts the users). But if this workaround is not appropriate, I think a new upstream bug should be filed about that. Do you agree with that?

SO HOW THE HELL DO I REMOVE ALL THE DATA?!?!?!?

I MEAN NOW, BEFORE THE WORKAROUND?!

Press Ctrl+H, you'll see all data - select it all, and do Shift+Delete.

thank you.

FYI - I just submitted bug 362050 to complain about the leftover .Trash folder.

Yes, I have used 3 SD cards from different brands, it created a corrupted .Trash folder and the only way to write to those SD cards is to use Windows.

Please, remove the .Trash-$user in removable drives, completly, is an incredible pain in the ass for
human users.

Please, remove the creation of the .Trash-$USER folder
in removable drives, completly, is an incredible pain in the ass for
human users.

Please, remove the creation of the .Trash-$USER folder
in removable drives, completly, is an incredible pain in the ass for
human users.

Thanks

The fix from upstream is that the user is prompted to emtpy the trash when the drive is unmounted. This fix is in Karmic, but a big problem is that this dialog is not triggered when ejecting a drive in Nautilus, only when unmounting.

In Nautilus "ejecting" is the default action, "unmounting" is only accessible through a context menu. Most users therefore probably never encounter this dialog. The obvious fix (to me) would be to also trigger the dialog on eject, not only on unmount (Although I really don't know the difference between these two actions).

I think a new bug should be filled for last Fabian comment: the trash is not deleted when the flash drive is ejected of safely removed.
However, the best option would be in my opinion to never create a trash on flash drive, as requested here: http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/14871/

Workaround - create blank files on the removable drive named ".Trash-1000", ".Trash-1001", and so on as needed. Since it cant create a folder because a file already exists with the same name, it asks if it can permanently delete. At least this worked for me with a FAT32 SD card.

Kind of awkward having to copy those files to every usb drive or SD card I have, but it is less annoying than the default behavior.

I only post this because this is where Google brought me and so it is probably bringing others here.

I don't get prompted to clear the trash at unmount... Still getting a .Trash-<UID> created. I'm running...

Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS
Release: 10.04
Codename: lucid

Ryan, just curious, is this a fresh install of Ubuntu with a fresh user account? Not saying that it justifies this bug still existing, just wondering why it still happens.

It is definitely not a fresh user. The user ID that I've been using has been around for a while. (Are you thinking maybe some legacy configuration settings are causing this?)

Also, the install of 10.04 was performed via do-release-upgrade. Prior to that, I believe 9.04 was the version that I installed from scratch.

Il 07/08/2010 23:07, Ryan Daly ha scritto:
> It is definitely not a fresh user. The user ID that I've been using has
> been around for a while. (Are you thinking maybe some legacy
> configuration settings are causing this?)
>
> Also, the install of 10.04 was performed via do-release-upgrade. Prior
> to that, I believe 9.04 was the version that I installed from scratch.
>
>
Sono più di due anni utente di linux-ubuntu ed e vero che ultima distro
ho installato tramite aggiornamento da 9.04.ogni tanto mi succede che
scarico delle fotografie da macchina fotografica si e bloccato, ma in
verità solo rallenta moltissimo perché su macchina fotografica avevo
anche alcuni filmati.E per questo motivo che rallenta, ho capito
dopo.Altrimenti mio ubuntu funziona perfettamente, anche se ho un
computer vecchio con soli 1 GB di RAM e vecchia scheda madre e processore.
Vi ringrazio moltissimo per la vostra attenzione e vi porgo i miei
sinceri amichevoli saluti!
Zoran Simonovic

There needs to be a separate way to empty the trash on the volume. At the moment I am forced to empty the main trash can which I do not like to do very often.

Can't believe this awful annoying bug is still present after 6 years... very sad to see...

The bug is still present on a fresh install of ubuntu 11.10

If I delete a file or a folder on my USB key he reappears in the folder /media/KAOKEY/.Trash-1000/files/
If I retry to delete him directly from the .Trash-1000 he reappears with a news extenstion, file.txt becomes file.2.txt. It's endless.

Only a "rm -r" or a shift+suppr erase finaly the files.

It's very confusing for new users.
Kind regards

This is really necessary when your key is full , you don't have to eject your key before having more space

Please!
I'm using Ubuntu for years now! This is on of the TOP5 Bugs to me overall on Ubuntu.
It's not so bad to me, but telling people that are new to Ubuntu, that they have to delete their files on their drives by pressing Shift+Del makes no fun.

Is it so hard to implement this? What is the reason, this is only on "Whishlist"?

just empty your trash. easy.

what if i forget to empty the trash.
unmount and some other mount it again.
will the trash be recognized?

What people seems to not understand it's that it's counter-intuitive to pretend that a user must be aware of the destination of it's removed files and moreover that it doesn't free its key space as expected.

When you delete files, there are two reasons: the file is useless + you don't have enough storage. This is particulary true on removable storage which have fewer space than HDD.

So, no, getting a trash on the key is not a solution, and asking for user to empty their unknown trash neither.

We need to start from the real need of a trash. It is for give the user the ability to undo its deletion. Do this undo must really last when the key is removed? Perhaps it depends on the size of the removable storage: a removable HDD is more expected to have a trash than a small flash key.

The only problem in fact from the start of this bugreport is that we don't even have the choice to have or not to have a trash folder on our media. This choice has been made a day and keep plagging everyday use of number of users without any settings to prevent this behavior (system wide or media specific setting).

True.
I would at least suggest the way, that everyone can choose to have a trash or not have a trash on removable devices.

If it's so hard to implement this, then at least ASK the user when ejecting, if one wants to empty the trash.
Or... if the user wants to copy files on the removable device and there is not enough space, because of the files in the trash, then ASK, if trash should be opened.

Тhere is on the other hand a high number of discussions of guys now trying to make a volume trash.

The solution looks very simple to me.
Instead of automatically creating .Trash-nnnn directories with possible permission problems to do so,
make it a partition formatting user option to "create a trash" (term he understands) and then create
drwxrwxrwt root root .Trash
Note the sticky bit t.
If .Trash exists when deleting a file, a nnnn trash subdirectory is created without permission problem.

It might be easier to see a per volume trash than display by list sorted by original location.
Ejecting the volume may indeed offer to empty the trash, but only of the ejected volume.
It's even recommended if the volume is liable to be mounted on another system with different uids.
Trash creation/removal may of course occur after formatting as a Nautilus function.

I notice that the Trash applet does not see the volume trash of the boot partition when its /home is a symbolic link to the mount point of a volume.

How?

This bug is more than 10 years old, and all the other projects are marked as Fix Released, so I just closed the last one (Baltix).

If you think it's still an issue and worth investigating, feel free to reopen the bug. If this is the case, I suggest you reopen the bug in the upstream bug tracker, where the development actually occurs. I'm sure if you work on a patch, they'll be more than happy to review it and consider merging. This way, many more projects will benefit from your work, instead of just Baltix.

I was asking "what solution was used?" because I can't really find out if my suggestion was considered.
Do not create /.Trash-$USER directories but $USER directories in /.Trash and only if that directory exists.
So, the user chooses if he/she/it wants a trash by creating /.Trash or not when formating or with a utility.