How to manage the trash from the terminal

In the following article I will show you how to manage the recycle bin from the terminal of our operating system Ubuntu.

Surely you are thinking that what is this for, since we can do everything from the Graphic interface of our system, and I have to tell you that it is indeed much easier to do it graphically, but I must also tell you that it is never too much to know how the terminal works, and what we are actually doing when we move, delete or restore a file or directory from the recycle bin.

First of all, it will be to open a new terminal:

Now we have to know which route it is on the recycle bin of our operating system, and in this case, Ubuntu, we can find it in the route:

.local / share / Trash / files

So to access from the terminal we will have to write:

cd ~ / .local / share / Trash / files

Now for list or view content that we have in the trash we will use the ls command:

ls

As we can see in the screenshot above, I only have three files created especially for this tutorial, so we can see a folder called binder, a document called document and another document called Untitled document.

How to delete a document, file or directory

For remove completely a file or document we will use the command rm, for example, to delete the document we will write in the terminal:

rm document

If we wanted delete folder, we would have to write rm - r:

rm -r Folder

Restore items

To restore the elements that we want from the trash we will do it in two ways, or moving them to another directory or copying them.

With the command mv We will move them to where we want:

mv document / home / francisco / Documents

With this line we will move the document to our directory of the personal folder Documents, logically we will have to change the username for our user.

For copy we will do the same but using the command cp:

cp document / home / francisco / Documents

Finally, para empty completely the recycle bin, wherever we are, that is, without being directly on the route /.local/share/Trash/files, we will type the following line in the terminal:

rm -r /home/francisco/.local/share/Trash/files/*

Notice that at the end of the line there is an asterisk* and what should we change Francisco by your username.

This is the only command that we can execute from any part of the terminal, the others will have to be positioned in the path specified above which is where the Ubuntu recycle bin is located.

More information - Getting into the terminal: basic commands