Managing the wastebasket in GNOME

This is more a personal note than anything else, but I’m putting it here on the off chance that someone else might find it useful.

I noticed that the wastebasket on my PC desktop had become rather full. This is both inevitable and unsurprising given that, by default, deleting files sends them to the wastebasket and then leaves them there. Forever.

I want to be able to clear out these deleted files, but not all of them because I sometimes need to go back and recover what I have deleted. Fortunately, a solution exists in the form of trash-cli, a command line interface that allows you to manage the FreeDesktop trash folder.

The package provides several commands, the most useful of which for me is the trash-empty command, which not only allows me to permanently delete trashed files, but also to specify how many days to keep. I played around with it a bit and it does exactly what it promises to do.

Being lazy, I have also scheduled this to run every Monday so that I can start the week with nothing more than a month old in my wastebasket. This should ensure that things remain a bit more manageable in future.