The trashcan is not emptied on an NTFS-3G partition

Binary package hint: nautilus

When a file resident in an NTFS-3G partition of the internal hard disk is meant to be deleted or moved to the trash, the results are not what is intended.

a) The file is not moved to the trashcan, but it seemingly disappears

b) Although the file has disappeared, the diskpace is not recovered. It is not recovered either when the trashcan is emptied. These files, instead, remain hidden in a ".Trash-$user" directory that is not emptied when the "empty trashcan" action is selected.

To recover the space, the .Trash directory has to be revealed by showing hidden files while browsing the root directory of the NTFS partition, and then it may to deleted with the "move to the trashcan" command which, by the way, says it is not possible to move that directory to the trashcan and (finally) offers the possibility of permanent deletion.

This is far from logical or intuitive. Bug 12893 details a similar problem, whereby a file that is deleted in a flashcard is also silently moved to a hidden directory in the card. Whatever the considerations about whether trash should travel in the card when it is extracted, the problem is not the same, because here it's fixed partitions we're dealing with, and deleted files never show up in the trashcan nor are they permanently deleted when the trashcan is emptied.