GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 108413
The trash bin should empty automatically
Last modified: 2006-10-27 11:47:14 UTC
This has just happened to an user here: He wanted to copy something to an empty floppy disk and there was a "disk full error". After some investigation I've found out that it was the trash directory in the floppy disk. This shouldn't have happened! The trash should nevere make a normal operation to fail with "disk full". There should be a configurable percentage with the maximun use the trash directory can use! This is a polich and usability issue (specially for newbie users).
There should be some sensible threshold such as 5% or 10% of the size of the filesystem $HOME is on at which Nautilus warns about Trash overfill in a *nonintrusive* way. This does not mean to display a warning window just once (user will forget) or everytime you move something into Trash (annoying). It could mean adding a warning notice such as "Your Trash is very full. You might want to delete part or all of it permanently." to the Trash properties window and to the transfer window displayed when moving something to Trash. Perhaps it should also offer you a button to clean out everything in the trash older than 30 days or such. Completely emptying the trash can should never be necessary because the most recent deletions should always stay on hand.
*** Bug 149572 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Bug 149572 suggests that files in the trash older than i.e. 3 months should be automatically deleted.
NOTE in comment 3 i.e. should be e.g.
A "configurable percentage" won't solve the original problem 100% of the time. Neither will a "sensible threshold". And neither will automatically deleting stuff from the Trash over a certain age (though that would be extremely nifty). The only OS I know of that solved this particular problem 100% of the time was, I regret to say, Mac OS Classic. ___________________________________________ |:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::| | , | | /!\ There is not enough room on the disk | | """ "Mark's Stuff" to copy the selected | | items, unless you empty the Trash. | | Do you want to empty the Trash now? | | | | ( Cancel ) (( OK )) | |___________________________________________| (The Mac OS X Finder isn't as smart; it just says there's not enough space.)
*** Bug 303156 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Dialog in #5 shows a good idea, but could be improved by a algorithm that deletes only as much files in the trash as needed - starting with the oldest.
Is it possible to just mark files as "trashed" and request that disk space is (re)claimed by the OS by oldes entry first, as needed?
I'm a maintainer of GNOME for ALT Linux distribution, and I have received multiple complaints about this behaviour recently. I believe that such a behaviour makes working with floppies, USB flash drives, cards etc. quite troublesome. If a user doesn't care about the Trash (which is often true), he/she can use the space of a media only once. I'm afraid, the significance of this bug is underestimated. The idea from comment 8 looks good to me but needs a lot of work and is prone to troubles, as we have a command line and file managers other than Nautilus. A dumb fix for the problem would be to switch off Trash for some kinds of media. When a user deletes data from such media, he gets a warning as for the permanent deletion. Although I'm not sure it is the best solution, it is relatively easy to do.
I can confirm this bug. It is very annoying to erase Trash when you are in a hurry. I would like the Trash contents to be deleted automatically without any useless dialogs if the media has too little space and if it really helps to free up enough space to perform the requested operation. I would also like to have a set of options to control Trash behaviour, such as 1) turning off Trash for floppies and small flash drives and 2) an option to delete small files to HDD Trash instead of floppy trash. If the file to be deleted is less then 1Mb, as many text and office documents are, it can be easy enough to copy it to HDD trash transparently and permanently delete it from the media. Caching can smooth the performance loss.
I'd either: 1. turn off trash for all devices <x GB, or for removeable devices at all. or 2. when you copy a file to an external drive, and there's not enough space left _because of the trash folder_ then the trash folder should just be deleted - optionally with a warning dialog like shown above. Tom
sounds more like bug 341722 to me *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 341722 ***
Bug 341722 is one possible solution, but not necessarily the best solution, to this bug. (And this bug was reported three years earlier.)