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I see the other thread on deleting the contents of ~/.local/share/Trash/expunged, I would like to know what those files are, I have 1 massive 108GB gz compressed file. Is that data? if I decompress that, will I get old user data? this issue is on a hard drive from 2012, with insufficient disk space to decompress, and probably inadequate system resources as well. but I REALLY don't like deleting things from old hard drives, especially, when Im also looking for old project code. did I delete it back in 2012 thinking bah, I'll never use that, and there it is, locking up disk space on an old hard drive?

I just want to know if its actual data files in ~/.local/share/Trash/expunged, or if its some other thing.

j0h
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2 Answers2

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When a directory hierarchy is ”trashed“ in Nautilus, it gets moved to the $trash/files directory. When the trash gets emptied, that hierarchy is first moved to $trash/expunged (because moving files is fast), and then slowly deleted from there (slowly because deleting a lot of files takes time and doing it too fast could slow down the whole computer). Unfortunately, deleting all those files is not always possible when somewhere down the tree there are files or directories with permissions that don't allow them to be deleted by the desktop user, and then those files remain there forever, without any warning for the user. — source

If you want to delete the files inside $trash/expunged, you'll probably need root permissions. See also this Ask Ubuntu question.

There's a related GNOME gitlab issue.

The 108GB gz compressed file you're having in the expunged directory probably has been created (compressed) and deleted by you. The trash doesn't perform any compression by itself.

myrdd
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'expunged' is where Trashed files get stuck when they don't belong to the user (so cannot delete them).

Trash keeps the original filenames, file types, and directory structure...until you empty the Trash. It doesn't compress files.

Somebody, long ago, put a 108GB compressed file that belonged to a different user into their Trash. It might well be data. Or not. Either way, you have lived without it for this long....

user535733
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