How To: Disk Full? - Check Your Trash

**SATXan** · January 13th, 2012

Thanks for creating and maintaining this resource.

I recently ended up with some files in root Trash that stubbornly would not be removed. They were placed there due to a stupid noob trick I managed using Clonezilla wherein I used root as a target for a backup (yeah, seemed like a good idea at the time

) This wasn't much more than annoying until I decided to move the system to a (small) SSD. Now that 20+GB was a big deal.

I followed all the instructions here but the root Trash just would not delete.

I finally found a link that suggested a tweak to the command line for nautilus:

Code:

gksudo dbus-launch nautilus

This allowed me to delete the offending files in Trash, never to be seen again.

I'd give attribution to where I found this tidbit, but I lost the URL in the flurry of searches and curses I was spewing at the time...

I don't pretend to truly understand why this worked in my circumstance, but maybe it would be helpful to others who've exhausted the other options.

Thanks.

**drs305** · January 13th, 2012

SATXan,

Thanks for sharing this and welcome to the Ubuntu Forums.

In recent versions of Ubuntu running Nautilus as root is sometimes problematic. Installing nautilus-gksu normally allows troublefree opening of folders as root by right clicking, but often users aren't aware of the nautilus-gksu package.

I'll add your command in the original post. Thanks for the contribution!