How to use Autotrash to totally forget about the trash
The trash (or "Recycle bin") is a sane concept of our operating systems. A file sent to the trash can be recovered if the user realizes the file was still needed after all. Now, the problem is: when should you empty the trash?
- If you never empty it, it grows and wastes valuable disk space
- If you empty it frequently, you lose its buffer benefits for recovery. Plus, who likes frequently doing this highly manual task?
- Finally, if like me, you get bored by this nonsense, you end up permanently bypassing the trash (with systematic Shift+Delete instead of Delete), which is of course very dangerous
Linux users, rejoice! Enter Autotrash. The name may sound a little scary, but this tiny command-line Python application is actually very friendly and fully solves the problems I just exposed. Its humble task is to selectively purge your trash based on certain criteria that you specify, like Deletion date, Remaining disk space, or Regular expressions.
Edit 2010/04/14: Windows users, Martin found a great app for you, read his followup article.
For example, you can tell Autotrash to delete files that have been in the trash for more than 7 days ago, and to ensure that at least 10GB remain available:
This means our three problems are solved:
- The trash never gets too big
- It always contains a reasonable recent backlog of deleted items, ready for the occasional recovery
- Geeks like me can come back to sane Delete practices
The next question you'll probably ask is: "Great, but I don't want to have to run Autotrash manually, how do I setup a schedule?". In typical GNU style, Autotrash doesn't do that, and it's okay because it's not its job. To do the scheduling, I suggest that:
- Either you setup a cron task running every n hours
- Or, if you are as lazy as I am, you can simply add Autotrash to the Startup programs:
In my case, I generally shut down my computer for the night, so launching Autotrash at startup is a satisfying "good enough" tradeoff.
The most straightforward way to install Autotrash on an Ubuntu machine is to use its PPA. Inside a terminal, enter:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bneijt/ppa && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install autotrash
Once the installation is done, open the manual page to see what it can do, and do your own setup:
man autotrash
Autotrash is free software licensed under the GPLv3, currently available as source or Ubuntu PPA. Special thanks to nekohayo who made me discover it.
Ronan is a geek and musician living in Montreal. He enjoys days when his hard drive doesn't evaporate because of an accidental keystroke and rambles about software, music and life at flying molehill.
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One small tweak to the install to get it working: you need to do a ‘sudo apt-get update’ between adding the PPA & install autotrash.
Thanks for reviewing a handy little utility! I look forward to using it.
Thanks Lance, I fixed it.
Feel free to share your Autotrash tips here once you’ve used it a bit.