Hidden trash on Hardy Heron

Probably of interest only to people using Ubuntu, or at least some flavour of Linux…

Just solved the mystery of what was hogging the spare space on my /home partition.

There was a hidden directory called .Trash-0. It had 500MB of old data in it, none of which was displayed by clicking on the “wastebasket” and none of which was being removed by “Empty deleted items”! But I was able to remove it by being root in nautilus (command-line sudo nautilus.)

Something like this happened once before, a year or more ago – but I don’t think I wrote it down last time, or if I did, I don’t know what I did with the description. So I thought this time I’d blog it for future reference (and in the hope it might also be useful to someone else).

I think the wastebasket commands only look in .Trash (no suffix), which would explain why they weren’t accessing this.

Having found this directory, I wondered how the mysterious -0 arose. A search for “.Trash-0″ turned up a few threads. Some people said it can happen due to disk format incompatibility; others said not all utilities know how to delete properly.

At the moment, I can’t quite think how either of those situations would have arisen in my case. But it doesn’t really matter, as long as I remember to check every now and again and delete any such debris. I’ll call upon the reminding powers of MyChores :-)

I’ll also remind myself here that the System Monitor utility is a useful thing. System | Administration | System Monitor, and click on its File Systems tab for a summary of all the disks and their available space.